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[ { "body": "Yes.\n\nArchaeoastronomy is a field of study that analyzes how past civilizations understood the sky, and what cultural role that may have had for their scientific understanding, religious beliefs and practices, their society's architecture, or upon their arts. Clive Ruggles is a well known scholar in the field, I recommend his books *Ancient Astronomy*, and *The Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy*. The article [Archaeology and astronomy](https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/50/5/5.29/194649) by Sue Bowler, in the Academic Journal *Astronomy & Geophysics*, is an online source that will give you a taste of some of the discourse. There's also this study with dozens of authors available as a PDF, [Heritage Sites of Astronomy and Archaeoastronomy in the context of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention.](http://openarchive.icomos.org/id/eprint/267/1/ICOMOS_IAU_Thematic_Study_Heritage_Sites_Astronomy_2010.pdf) \n\n\n​\n\nA somewhat tangential area of study, is the field of archaeomagnetism, which looks at the movement of the earth's geomagnetic pole through history. Old ceramics made of clay (like pottery) that was heated to high temperatures will actually mirror the magnetic field of the earth at the time it was heated. When we combine that data with the date of the object (determined via other widely accepted means for the field of archaeology) we get a snap shot of the earth's magnetic pole in that moment of time. We can use that information as we look historically at the Aurora Borealis, further enhancing our understanding by cross-referencing with surviving astronomy records. One example of this being applied is Harald Falck Ytter's *Aurora: The Northern Lights in Mythology, History and Science.*", "created_utc": 1684880274, "distinguished": null, "id": "jlcm8zc", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/13pi8m3/is_there_a_job_that_involves_astronomy_and/jlcm8zc/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "Hi there - unfortunately we have had to remove your question, because [/r/AskHistorians isn't here to do your homework for you](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_homework). However, our rules DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself. \r\n\r\nIf you have indeed asked a homework question, you should consider resubmitting a question more focused on finding resources and seeking clarification on confusing issues: tell us what you've researched so far, what resources you've consulted, and what you've learned, and we are more likely to approve your question. Please see this [Rules Roundtable](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hplxyf/rules_roundtable_xx_the_no_homework_rule/) thread for more information on what makes for the kind of homework question we'd approve. Additionally, if you're not sure where to start in terms of finding and understanding sources in general, we have a six-part series, \"[Finding and Understanding Sources](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/theory#wiki_monday_methods.3A_finding_and_understanding_sources)\", which has a wealth of information that may be useful for finding and understanding information for your essay. Finally, other subreddits are likely to be more suitable for help with homework - try looking for help at /r/HomeworkHelp. \r\n\r\nAlternatively, if you are not a student and are not doing homework, we have removed your question because it resembled a homework question. It may resemble a common essay question from a prominent history syllabus or may be worded in a broad, open-ended way that feels like the kind of essay question that a professor would set. Professors often word essay questions in order to provide the student with a platform to show how much they understand a topic, and these questions are typically broader and more interested in interpretations and delineating between historical theories than the average /r/AskHistorians question. If your non-homework question was incorrectly removed for this reason, we will be happy to approve your question if you **wait for 7 days** and then ask a less open-ended question on the same topic.", "created_utc": 1677373867, "distinguished": "moderator", "id": "ja119cp", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/11c15ca/what_perspective_did_herodotus_write_the/ja119cp/", "score": 1 } ]

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[ { "body": "‘Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig’ does a good job of covering the history of pork consumption back to ancient history, but does not detail butchering techniques. \n\nHere are some additional books that speak to the history of meat, but may not have the butchering specifics you’re interested in — \n\n‘The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food’\n\n‘The Sacred Cow: The Case for Better Meat’\n\n‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’\n\n‘The Dorito Effect’ - specially speaks to chickens, and the Chicken of Tomorrow competition.", "created_utc": 1658489252, "distinguished": null, "id": "ih6cb71", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/w4wt98/is_there_a_book_or_resource_that_deals_with_the/ih6cb71/", "score": 6 } ]

[ { "body": "This question, nearly exactly came up barely a week ago with a good answer from u/itsallfolklore\n\nhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ttqg14/how_do_we_know_that_our_history_is_correct/\n\nIn that same thread I replied with an older answer from a similar question answered by u/DanKensington here:\n\nhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sfj6up/given_the_extensive_misstatement_of_the_facts_in/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share \n\nThe long and short of it is that modern historians don't just naively take old primary sources at face value. People doing that is the domain of amateur pop historians and overzealous well-intentioned wikipedia editors. \n\nWe don't \"know\" anything by your definition. Do you know your birthday? How, you sure don't remember? Just your parents told you and you have some documentation to that effect. Why do you trust their memories and that documentation? Ok then, you are VERY confident your birthday is on a date because the documentation seems reliable, and your parents tell you a date. What if your parents told you a date all your life then you looked at your BC and saw a different one? Someone's wrong! Now your confidence goes down. That's the reality - history is about putting together lots of evidence that sometimes corroborates and sometimes contradicts, and building confidence, but not certainty, in certain events. As you can imagine people like Alexander and Caesar generated huge amounts of evidence, not just direct but indirect, not just written but archaeological, not just biased writings but administrative documents, and even then we still don't know all the exact details.\n\nA lot of people can actually get frustrated at how seemingly noncommittal historians are. Almost nothing is a nice clean narrative. Was Xerxes' invasion of Greece a crushing defeat to a massive imperial power by a team of underdog Greeks fighting for freedom....or was it a modestly successful bit of Persian adventurism cut short by a stout defense from the wealthy and powerful in their own right city states? Or somewhere in between?", "created_utc": 1649504457, "distinguished": null, "id": "i40ufnw", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/tzm3z9/how_do_we_know_any_of_our_ancient_history_is/i40ufnw/", "score": 129 }, { "body": "There's a solid section in the [FAQ that goes over some of this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/theory#wiki_historiography_and_studying_primary_sources).", "created_utc": 1649486225, "distinguished": null, "id": "i406zmm", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/tzm3z9/how_do_we_know_any_of_our_ancient_history_is/i406zmm/", "score": 22 }, { "body": "Just to add on to what others have said ITT, other threads, and the FAQs:\n\nI like to think of it like a crime investigation. If you're relying on just one eyewitness report, your case is probably going to get thrown out. But as you add more eyewitness accounts, forensics (archaeology), documents, and so on all pointing in the same direction, your case gets stronger and stronger. And like a criminal investigation, it's pretty rare for something to be a 100% certainty. That's why the goal is \"beyond reasonable doubt.\"\n\nI've also heard it compared to a mosaic or jigsaw puzzle. You can't just look at one piece and see much of anything. Even if that piece has an inscription on the back that says, \"this is what happened.\" It's still your job as a historian to put together the rest of the puzzle. The color of some pieces might be completely wrong. A lot of pieces might be missing. But if you know what you're doing and put in the time and effort, you can still get a pretty decent picture of what happened.", "created_utc": 1649552964, "distinguished": null, "id": "i43uozp", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/tzm3z9/how_do_we_know_any_of_our_ancient_history_is/i43uozp/", "score": 8 } ]

[ { "body": "Yes, many times, and often when they weren't actively being invaded, Egypt was still meddling in their affairs. \n\nThe story of Shishak, specifically, is a difficult one to confirm in history because of the presence of the Hebrew king, Solomon, who is regarded as a mostly legendary character by historians. Based on the chronology offered by 1 and 2 Kings, and the corresponding chronology from Egyptian documents, the most plausible historical identity is Pharaoh Shoshenq I. We don't know much about Shoshenq unfortunately, so it's basically impossible to confirm or deny the Biblical narrative. Egyptian pharaohs regularly invaded the Levant, so it's entirely plausible that Shoshenq could have as well, but very few records remain from his reign. We can say that the Bible indicates that Solomon lived around 940, and Shoshoenq was Pharaoh in that same period.\n\nOn the non-invasion end of things, *2 Kings* 17 covers the reign of Hoshea, the final king of Israel/Samaria who was conquered by the Assyrians and references a Pharaoh named \"Sho,\" who is hard to identify. Conventionally \"Sho\" gets associated with Pharaoh Osorkon IV, but could also be and abbreviated version of \"Shoshenq V.\" Many ancient cultures would occasionally abbreviate the names of foreign rulers like that, and the Egyptian succession chronology around that time (c.730 BC) isn't well established. Regardless of the specific Pharoah, *2 Kings* explains that Hoshea had been a vassal of Assyria but rebelled because he expected the Egyptians to invade and back him up. They didn't, and Assyria conquered the northern Hebrew kingdom.\n\nBoth *2 Kings* 19 and *Isaiah* 37 refer to an invasion by \"Tirhakah, king of Kush\" in the reign of Hezekia in Judah. That neatly corresponds to Pharaoh Taharqa of the 25th Dynasty, except the Biblical and Egyptian chronologies don't align on this one. This Pharaoh invaded Judah, which remained an Assyrian vassal, to support several of his own vassals in their rebellion against the Assyrian king, Sennacherib. Based on *2 Kings* 19, this should have been in 701 BC, but Egyptian records don't place Taharqa on the throne until around 690. \"Tirhakah\" doesn't fit with any other Egyptian or Nubian name, and the events described are completely inline with the Egyptian and Assyrian histories of that period. The most likely explanation for the discrepancy is a simple error on the part of the author of *2 Kings*, or even their scribes. It could be a mistaken regnal year, or it could be a mistake over which Pharaoh was ruling at the time.\n\nThe last major Biblical invasion by Egypt is also possibly the most famous. Taharqa's war against Assyria (and Judah by extension) failed. Over the course of several invasions in the following years, the Assyrians conquered Egypt and placed a new \"Egyptian\" (technically acculturated Libyan) dynasty on the throne. The new 26th Dynasty maintained a close alliance with Assyria, and when Assyria was on its last legs in 609 BC, Pharaoh Necho II used that alliance as a pretext to march north. The Assyrians had already been all but destroyed by a coalition of Babylonians and Medes who had destroyed their capital and hounded them to a Syrian outpost called Harran, where the Assyrians were defeated once and for all.\n\nNecho was not able to reach them in time for a few reasons. A) He probably didn't actually want to and just used it as a causus belli. B) In a bid for true independence, King Josiah of Judah led an army out to face Necho as the Egyptians were marching through Judean territory at Meggido. Josiah was killed in battle, and Necho continued on his way. On his way back a few months later, Necho threatened to do it again and deposed Josiah's son without a fight. Over the next 4 years, Egypt and Babylon sparred for control of the Levant repeatedly, but the Babylonians ultimately won and pushed all the way to the Sinai.\n\nThat conflict between Egypt and Babylon ultimately set the scene for Judah's own conflicts with the Babylonians. Many Judean nobles and kings saw Egypt as a more appealing benefactor, while others like the prophet Jeremiah were pro-Babylonian. Around 601 BC, King Jehoiakim pledged tribute to Babylon, but by 598 the pro Egypt camp had won out, sparking the rebellion that ended with a siege of Jerusalem and the beginning of the famed Babylonian Deportation. 13 years later, King Zedekiah of Judah made an alliance with Pharaoh \"Hophra\" according to *Jeremiah.* Through some linguistic quirks of Egyptian, Hebrew, and Greek that corresponds correctly to Pharaoh Apries, who had already antagonized the Babylonians. *Jeremiah* says he expected some kind of aid from Egypt, but it never came and Jerusalem fell to Babylon.\n\nThe Jews were returned from their exile by the Persian Empire after they conquered Babylon 14 years later, the Persians conquered Egypt too, but in 404 BCE Egypt broke away. One of the early Pharaohs in this period, Hakor, supported several rebellions against the Persians in the Levant. Based on some scant evidence from the Jewish historian Josephus, some historians suggest that he, or the later Pharaoh Nectanebo II, may have tried to instigate one in Judea as well, but it was clamped down on by the Persian authorities. \n\nAt least one of these interim Pharaohs, Teos, may have planned on invading/annexing Judea around 359. He sailed to Phoenicia with a Greek mercenary army but was betrayed and assassinated upon landing. Given that Phoenicia was north of Judea, any military success would have cut the Judeans off from Persia and pulled them into the Egyptian orbit.\n\nThen there's the Ptolemaic period. The Persians only briefly recaptured Egypt before being conquered by Alexander the Great. After Alexander died, his successors battled for control of his empire. Ptolemy I had been Alexander's governor of Egypt, and fled there (with Alexander's corpse) to become the new, independent ruler of Egypt. He conquered Judea by first infiltrating Jerusalem under the guise of performing sacrifices on the Sabbath and attacking/seizing power from the inside before subduing the surrounding region by force and enslaving a large number of POWs. \n\nFrom then, Judea was conquered by the Seleucids in 200 BC, rebelled and gained independence in 141 BC, and held the status quo until the Romans arrived. As the Romans subjugated Judea before annexing Egypt, and then abolished the Jewish-governed province in 70 AD, there wasn't another time for an independent power from Egypt to invade a Jewish power in the southern Levant until the modern wars between Egypt and Israel.", "created_utc": 1655260464, "distinguished": null, "id": "icepmq9", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/vb72lw/were_the_hebrews_ever_attacked_by_egypt_in/icepmq9/", "score": 7 } ]

[ { "body": "While you wait for a more comprehensive answer, the always wonderful u/Spencer_A_McDaniel has written an excellent article about Ancient Greek music, complete with reconstructed recording of most pieces of music from the Greek world that have survived.\n\nhttps://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/10/30/what-did-ancient-greek-music-sound-like/", "created_utc": 1648884304, "distinguished": null, "id": "i33143j", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ttn9dx/is_there_any_surviving_lyrics_from_ancient_history/i33143j/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "There are various representations of the Sphinx in New Kingdom art (*edit:* 'New Kingdom' means 16th to 11th centuries BCE), showing it as having a beard and a crown. These can't have been part of the original carving: the beard was detached -- fragments have been found -- and it is suspected that the large hole on top of the Sphinx's head is where the crown would have been attached.\n\nThe first textual description with any real detail is in Pliny the Elder's *Natural history*, [36.77](https://archive.org/details/naturalhistory0010plin_r3x5/page/60/mode/2up?view=theater), dating to the 1st century CE (and given here in a fresh translation):\n\n> In front [of the pyramids] is the Sphinx, which may be even more worth describing -- though the custom is to stay silent about it, venerating its holiness. They think king Harmais is buried inside, and they claim it seems to have been transported; but it is carved from the natural rock. The face of the creature, of red earth, is worshipped [the text is doubtful, or this sentence is rather telescoped]. The circumference of its head at the forehead is 102 feet, its length 243 feet, and its height from its belly to the peak of the asp on its head is 61.5 feet.\n\nTraces of red pigment have been found on the Sphinx, corroborating Pliny's report of 'red earth' (*rubrica*). Pliny's reference to the 'asp' on the Sphinx's head refers to a feature of the crown, which was evidently still present in Pliny's time. New Kingdom depictions, such as [this one on the Dream Stele](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/ReproductionOfDreamSteleOfThutmoseIV-CloseUp_RosicrucianEgyptianMuseum.png) provide some corroboration for a decorative crown, though it's reported that different New Kingdom depictions have different details.\n\nIf Pliny is reporting Roman feet, the measurements work out to 30.2 m for the head, 71.9 m for the length, and 18.2 m for the height; these are a bit low, so it may be that the measurements were in Attic or Ptolemaic feet. Then, though, the figures would be a little high; then again ancient measurements are often a bit wonky (though they had extremely good precision when it came to building new buildings).\n\nThe name 'Harmais' is Pliny's version of *Harmachis*, the hellenised version of Hor-em-akhet, a divinity with whom the Sphinx was identified in the New Kingdom period.\n\nHere by the way are some reconstructions by Mark Lehner showing the headdress, crown, and beard: [profile](https://opencontext.org/media/38e9c713-7d6c-4e03-bb1c-c39511d54247), and [frontal](https://opencontext.org/media/455225cb-76e6-48c3-9ae4-eb1995c6108a).", "created_utc": 1646862795, "distinguished": null, "id": "i00zvkp", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/t9xfs3/are_there_any_prominent_or_any_at_all_references/i00zvkp/", "score": 7 } ]

[ { "body": "I mean that's a super broad question to answer simply because we don't know. Since wood rots in almost every climate and circumstance produced by nature, almost all of it has and the only way we could know the potential is if it hadn't, and if all the wood didn't rot you wouldn't be asking this question because nothing would of been lost. So it's a bit of a paradox.\n\nBesides that I dont think it's any great leap too assume that we have lost a lot. Less so I'm the field of smaller objects because they gave be placed into more preservative conditions than a larger wooden structures. For example we have preserved spear shafts like the the Lendbreen spear found in Norway, which is a spear from the viking era with a remarkablely preserved shaft which survived by being frozen in ice and recovered before it thawed out and was exposed, but a repeating phenomenon with something like a house, would be near impossible. We see this again and again with smaller objects being preserved in ice, and finds recovered by groups such as Secrets of the Ice are able to recover every day items of wood such as snow shoes, arrow shafts, saddle parts, and more.\n\n So while we still lack quite a bit of information on smaller objects in or near climates which can work to preserve, we lack the most information in the fields of watercraft and architecture. Architecture is a bit easier to trace since when wood rots underground it will leave a different color soil which can be seen quite easily with the trained naked eye. This allows us to identify structures which were supported by wooden steaks driven into the ground such as Anglo Saxon and Neolithic British dwellings, such as reconstructed by West Stow Mueseum. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Stow_Anglo-Saxon_Village) So most of our information on architecture is only preserved on soil evidence like this or period depictions, which in many cases are also few and far between.\n\nLastly the hardest to preserve finds of wood are probably boats. It is likely that you know wood rots in water quite well, and boats are in it quite a bit so often our only finds of boats are when they are buried or parts of it are buried under, near, or away from water. So leading off of that we do have the occasional find from periods such as the Osberg Ship which was buried ceremonially in a funeral or the Utrecht Roman Barge which was used as a road support and was covered in silt as a result. We do have some finds like this from here and there but since boats aren't meant for land, they are all together pretty rare. When we do find one such as this (https://www-cnn-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.cnn.com/travel/amp/roman-shipwreck-kefalonia-fiskardo/index.html?amp_js_v=a6&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQHKAFQArABIA%3D%3D#aoh=16229457688034&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2Ftravel%2Farticle%2Froman-shipwreck-kefalonia-fiskardo%2Findex.html) Roman cargo ship in the medditeranian or the Madrague de Giens, we may find a few scraps but the identifying feature is the cargo and shape. Often times cargo was transported in pottery due too its convenience, and since pottery is just earth stuck in fire it doesn't really rot so if it is in a relatively peaceful climate like hundreds of feet below the surface or sitting in a calm patch of water it won't crumble to be dispersed by tides. So in short we probably have the least info on boats just due too a lack of archeological evidence, both from difficult preservation and less human exposure and thus less chance of discovery, as well as many period works not taking time to detail intricacies of ships since most artists weren't sailors at the time.\n\nLastly any things that may of been preserved by wood. Now just carving things into boards hasn't been immensely popular as a form of sharing knowledge since its easier to write than carve and wood is hard to transport, store, and read. It can have bumps and knots and is hard to turn into planks so most cultures simply found better alternatives. Some cultures like China and Japan used early forms of paper, the middle east, Africa, Middle East, and Europe would of used parchment before exposure too paper. Some cultures used paper like alternatives such as Egypt's papyrus scrolls, other cultures such as Sumerians used clay tablets. But there were some uses of wood in writing. An archeological find I am quite fond of is Onfim's notes in Novgorod. In short it was a 6 or 7 year old boy who took school notes by carving it into sheets of birch bark, with these notes he also doodled, practiced letters, drew scenes of knights, monsters, battle, etc but that's besides the point. These along with other birch bark notes were found in a ditch outside of the city and had been preserved by silt. We also see things like this with certain North American Native tribes using birch bark to create geometric shapes and and art, but this seems like a more limited practice on an international scale due to lack of widespread used since there are better materials which fully literate people who were taught to write could more easily afford. Now as for wood carvings they would of been more decorative or symbolic rather than detailing actual information given it takes a long time to carve on wood, it is delicate work, and near impossible to transport. \n\nHope that answers your question.", "created_utc": 1622947250, "distinguished": null, "id": "h0r6k3s", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/nt116i/how_much_ancient_history_is_lost_forever_simply/h0r6k3s/", "score": 42 } ]

[ { "body": "Yes this actually happens. It’s rare with such well documented persons but there was one “emperor” during the third century crisis who was “lost” to history until the 1930s when he was found on a random coin in the British museum.\n\nEmperor Silbannacus is now believed to have reigned briefly during the Third Century Crisis. Now, it’s important to stress that we really don’t know much, if anything, about this guy so it’s impossible to give the kind of detailed response we like to see on this sub. However, I’ll link to an interesting article on how he was “discovered” below.\n\nRegarding the part of your question on how “firm” the imperial succession was, the answer is not very. We are way before male primogeniture in terms of picking a successor emperor for most of Western Roman history. Augustus for example (who never actually called himself “emperor” by the way, he was the “first citizen”) probably wanted to leave the purple to Drusus and there is evidence he did not want Tiberius to succeed.\n\nBasically, if you were popular with the army and happened to be in Rome when the emperor died, you had a pretty good chance of succeeding. However, there was an equally good chance of another general disagreeing with you on that and going for it themselves (for example the “year of the four emperors” AND later the “year of the five emperors”, as well as at various other points, hence our friend “emperor” Silbannacus of earlier). Essentially, the imperial succession came down to “might makes right”.\n\nThe emperor also was not a Monarch as we would understand from the Middle Ages. So called “co-emperors” were very common, particularly later into the empire. Marcus Aurelius for example ruled alongside Lucius Verus from 161-169 (Verus died) and later his son Commodus (yes, that one) from 177-180 (Aurelius died). This wasn’t uncommon at all and likely has its routes in the Consular system under the republic.\n\nFinal thing I think is worth mentioning is the Tetrarchy under Diocletian. Basically he decided to have several co-emperors all at once and… it was just a total disaster. He wanted to have two main emperors, each of whom would have an apprentice who would also be an emperor… it got very messy and this is normally where historians split the empire into east and west because amazingly that actually helps simplify things. \n\nhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/silbannacus-the-roman-emperor-that-time-forgot/", "created_utc": 1640113164, "distinguished": null, "id": "hpghvhm", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/rli2aq/ancient_history_facts_are_often_framed_in_a/hpghvhm/", "score": 28 } ]

[ { "body": "Not a silly question at all, actually a very good one requiring a complicated answer. I can't take a proper stab at it right now but I can point you towards some reading on the topic. This series of blog posts is very good, summarizing some thick and hard-to-get tomes on related subjects:\n\nhttp://hipcrimevocab.com/2017/02/18/labor-in-the-ancient-world-summary/\n\nhttp://hipcrimevocab.com/2017/02/25/urbanization-and-land-ownership-in-the-ancient-near-east-summary/\n\nhttp://hipcrimevocab.com/2017/03/12/privatization-in-the-ancient-world-summary/\n\nI think the author of those posts is on reddit, /u/thehipcrimevocab , might have some thoughts to contribute.\n\n\nYou might also check out [\"Ancient Land Law: Mesoptoamia, Egypt, Israel\"](https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1409&context=fss_papers)\n\nI've got a lot more material on this but it's all poorly organized and scattered around, I'll try to come up with something coherent later. I remember reading an article about the development of property purchase and sale laws in Mesopotamia, how at one point you could only sell the temporary use of land, and how some forms of property (including houses, inherited on a familial basis) were protected from purchase under some conditions, with the commercial real estate market being limited to shops and orchards/gardens, stuff like that, but the details escape me at the moment.\n\n\nI can say that in the Ur III period of Sumerian history, all land and property was owned by the temples and the palace. The use of land was rented out to tenant-farmers on an usufruct basis by the king and temples, usually in exchange for a set number of days of corvee labor on state and institutional projects. A lot of administrative texts from the period are concerned with keeping track of who is allotted which land and how much labor they've done; resettlement and relocation was common, but land transfer documents were rare; the transfer of land from one private individual to another only became commonplace later, and seems to have started in the royal household and progressed \"downwards\" through the social hierarchy, with richer elites and eventually commoners gradually gaining more rights to transfer land for commercial purposes.\n\nI believe the general narrative is that land management was typically organized under communal and usufruct principles in early states, and that the privatization of property took a long time to become prominent.", "created_utc": 1638505483, "distinguished": null, "id": "hn11b8g", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/r7d5za/did_a_concept_of_property_exist_in_prehistory/hn11b8g/", "score": 10 }, { "body": "Thanks for the mention! I'll have to go back and reread those posts. That final paragraph was spot on and a great summary!\n\nIf I understand the original question, it concerns property ownership and how people handled the concept of changing residences in prehistory? \n\nWell, hunter-gathers didn't have permanent residences, and their entire life was basically one long camping trip, so they didn't really own anything that they couldn't carry. People might move between different bands, but there was no concept of private property in our modern sense of the term. That's more than 95 percent of human history. Nomadic pastoralists are the same--highly mobile.\n\nIn a lot of food-producing societies, people don't live in individual houses but rather group dwellings such as the [Neolithic longhouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_long_house). Property would not be owned by individuals but by extended family groups such as clans, lineages, etc. These were associated with the lands they occupied, so moving was generally not an option. A great description comes from Robert Henry Lowie in *Primitive Society*:\n\n>\"It follows from the following that we cannot content ourselves with a blunt alternative: communism versus individualism. A people may be communisitic as regards one type of goods, yet recognize separate ownership with respect to other forms of property. Further, the communistic principle may hold not for the entire political unit of however high or low an order but only within the confines of a much smaller or differently constituted class of individuals, in which case there will indeed be collectivism but not communism in the proper sense of the term. These points must be kept in mind when surveying successively the primitive law of immovable and movable property, of immaterial wealth and of inheritance.\" Primitive Culture, p. 210\n\nI quoted this in my Substack if you want to read more: https://hipcrime.substack.com/p/the-village-and-the-clan\n\nAs for more developed civilizations such as the European Middle Ages, people didn't own many items, and if they did they were as mobile as possible, as Witold Rybczynski describes in *Home: A Short History of an Idea* (pp. 26-27)\n\n>In the Middle Ages, people didn't so much live in their houses as camp in them. The nobility owned many residences, and traveled frequently. When they did so, they rolled up the tapestries, packed the chests, took apart the beds, and moved their household with them. This explains why so much medieval furniture is portable or demountable. The French and Italian words for furniture--*mobiliers* and *mobilia*--mean \"the movables.\"\n\n>The town bourgeois were less mobile, but they too needed mobile furniture, although for a different reason. The medieval home was a public, not a private place. The hall was in constant use, for cooking, for eating, for entertaining guests, for transacting business, as well as nightly for sleeping. These different functions were accommodated by moving the furniture around as required. There was no \"dining table\" just a table which was used for preparing food, eating, counting money, and, in a pinch, for sleeping. Since the number of diners varied, the number of tables, and chairs, had to increase to accommodate them. At night, the tables were put away and the beds were brought out.\n\n>As a result, there was no attempt to form permanent arrangements. Paintings of medieval interiors reflect an improvisation in the haphazard placement of the furniture, which was simply put around the edges of the room when not in use. Except for the armchair, and later the bed, one has the impression that little importance was attached to the individual pieces of furniture; they were treated more as equipment than as prized personal possessions.\n\nFor most of human history, for the vast majority of people, you would live in the same place your entire life, outside of the upper classes like royalty. Recall that until the stream engine, animals were the only means of transport. Even then, until the automobile, personal mobility was practically nonexistent, and therefore, so was moving with more than the clothes on your back. In agrarian societies (including medieval Europe), most land and dwellings were not *alienable*, especially outside of cities, but were transferred by custom and tradition if at all. As the link below puts it, \"Early farming societies had complex, overlapping, flexible, nonspatial, and at least partly collective land-tenure systems with a significant commons in the sense that individuals retained one or another kind of access rights to land for different purposes.\"\n\nThe definitive book on Primitive Property is called--Primitive Property!--by Emile Lavaleye (which I learned about from Michael Hudson). It's free online: \n\nhttps://archive.org/details/primitiveproper01leslgoog/page/n6/mode/2up\n\nAnd here's another book about the prehistory of private property: https://basicincome.org/news/2021/06/the-prehistory-of-private-property-chapter-by-chapter-summary/", "created_utc": 1638723648, "distinguished": null, "id": "hncbn5s", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/r7d5za/did_a_concept_of_property_exist_in_prehistory/hncbn5s/", "score": 7 } ]

[ { "body": ">I wanted to ask if I should double major in anthropology due to the lack of exposure? I feel like I should've double majored in anthropology initially since there's more courses offered related to ancient history than the history department currently offers.\n\nI think this heavily depends on your department (and on where you'll eventually apply for graduate programs, but I don't expect you to have any firm ideas on that yet). If you have space in your course load to take those anthropology courses without taking on an additional major, that's certainly an option; if your history department is flexible, they may even allow you to count some of those courses for your history major upon petition. (You should reach out to the department's undergraduate studies coordinator/analogous position to ask about this possibility.)\n\nAre you planning on writing some sort of final thesis? This, too, would be a good place to draw on the anthropology department's resources without formally double-majoring—you can ask the relevant faculty member/s to informally advise you on your project, and hopefully forge the sorts of connections you'd need for them to write you a letter of recommendation. In the end, these connections are far more valuable than a double-major would be (since, again, you could likely do all the coursework without dealing with any bureaucratic red tape).\n\nEdited to add: my experience has been that admissions committees don't really care about double-majoring, and doing so might force you to water down your coursework with classes you're not interested in (anthropological methodology, fieldwork, etc.). If you can avoid this by talking to the relevant faculty and staff—both within the history department and in the anthropology department as well—you should be able to get all of the benefits of double-majoring with none of the drawbacks. Just make sure you mention it in your eventual statement of purpose!", "created_utc": 1635527853, "distinguished": null, "id": "hijbf78", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/qi4ukn/how_to_prepare_for_studying_ancient_history_for/hijbf78/", "score": 5 }, { "body": "You might want to choose between Mesoamerica and Classics/Mediterranean stuff, and then also choose within the Mesoamerican groups. For Mesoamerica, the most famous precontact scholars in the field today do not study the Mayas or the Aztecs from an ancient or classics perspective. They generally come from archaeology, anthropology, and art history, who mostly or exclusively focus on Mesoamerica (although they may have taken courses on other parts of the world during undergrad and grad school, or do some comparative work). Mayanists rarely study Central Mexico for example because the languages and scripts were different (again, exceptions because there was lots of contact between these them, which people do study). Scholars on the Aztecs don't do a ton of Maya epigraphy. I suppose there are some comparative religion scholars as well. Actually, very few historians study the precontact Maya. As far as I know, all of the famous epigraphers among Mayanists come from archaeology. The Aztecs on the other hand were a relatively new society, arising in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, so there are historians who study the precontact Aztecs (e.g. Camilla Townsend's recent great book Fifth Sun), even though there are also a lot of archaeologists. You might want to ask over in /r/askanthropology for advice. Or maybe there is an archaeology subreddit.\n\nIf you want to study Mesoamerica, you might consider beginning to learn a Mayan language or Nahuatl. These modern languages will help you read the precontact texts that you seem to be interested in. You may be able to find a summer program through your study abroad office. Or maybe your university offers courses. These programs might also be a way to go to Central Mexico, Yucatan, or Guatemala and learn about indigenous people and cultures.\n\nI would also encourage you to just keep taking classes and see what is interesting for you. If your schedule allows, try those anthropology courses you mentioned, even if you don't end up majoring in it. Maybe you can get a minor out of it. You have a long way to go before you would even apply for graduate school. Who knows what other twists and turns await you, which might take you in a different direction...or out of academia all together. Don't fear exploring a little. Are you sure you want to do super ancient stuff? Take some other classes on early modern or modern history. Begin doing primary source research whenever you can. What areas of research pull you? Dial in which geographic area you want to focus on. Maybe do a study abroad semester to that place, pandemic permitting? Also consider what other jobs might make you happy. Most people who dream about going into academia as undergrads, end up doing something else. That's ok! You can start down the road thinking about academia, but then end up heading in a totally different direction because some great opportunities came along along the way. But by the time you graduate and are still thinking grad school, you want to have built connections with people to write letters of recommendation for you and also have done research that you can turn in as a writing sample. So in the short term, keep exploring and find specifically what you like. In the medium term, do some primary source research. Once you've done that, reassess if you still want to go to grad school.", "created_utc": 1635575043, "distinguished": null, "id": "him3tgk", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/qi4ukn/how_to_prepare_for_studying_ancient_history_for/him3tgk/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "Finish your current MA degree in Ancient History. In the meantime, try to pick up some classes on Egyptian language, probably starting with Middle Egyptian (ca 2100 BCE to 300 CE) to boost your resume. If you have to go to a nearby University to find it, do that. Ancient Greek might be useful, too, at least a little bit, if available. You are in Switzerland so I assume your French and German are already pretty good, but if not, brush up on those (as these, along with English, will be the primary languages of scholarship in Egyptology; I would not bother with Arabic but some might disagree). Do as much work on the ancient Near East as possible during your MA, and if you are doing a writing option, write on a topic in the Near East (i.e., don't write on Roman Britain or Athenian economic history or something). In short: do everything you can to immerse yourself in Near Easter/Egyptian studies while still finishing your MA.\n\nNow apply to Egyptology doctorate programs. In America: Brown, Harvard (general Near Eastern), Johns Hopkins (Egyptology and Art History I think?), Berkeley (Near Eastern program), UCLA (Egyptology), Chicago (general Near Eastern?), Cincinnati (if Bronze Age focus?), University of Pennsylvania (multiple track options), Yale (multiple tracks). Outside the USA: Oxford, Cambridge, Toronto. In your application, you will emphasize your command of French, German, and English; you will emphasize your work already completed on Middle Egyptian and all the other studies you have done in the ancient Near Eastern world; you will submit a writing sample from your thesis (if you did one) on a Near Eastern topic.\n\nIf you would like to further buff your resume before applying to phd, you could consider the American University in Cairo, especially their MA focusing on Egyptian language, lit, and religion (where you will get some/more language training, I believe; you'd also probably pick up some Arabic).", "created_utc": 1610475744, "distinguished": null, "id": "gj0w8xx", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/kvwgpm/how_does_one_go_about_studying_ancient_egypt_with/gj0w8xx/", "score": 5 }, { "body": "Could you perhaps focus your MA thesis on something Egyptian? Maybe get a supervisor that's an Egyptologist, if you're motivated to do it yourself?\n\nFor the UK, you're pretty much locked out of most Egyptology PhD programmes as you don't have either a strong language or archaeology background. You can perhaps do something on Ptolemaic Egypt or something based in ancient history, but the UK basically means you have to write up straight away, which is going to be challenging for you. North America is an option, if you have strong grades, because they often don't need a background in the subject, as the course is so much longer.", "created_utc": 1610536625, "distinguished": null, "id": "gj3p392", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/kvwgpm/how_does_one_go_about_studying_ancient_egypt_with/gj3p392/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "Hi there! A website that i highly recommend is Perseus Digital Library. There you can find a ton of sources such as roman and greek historians, philosophers and much more. And, for our joy, you have them in Latin or Greek and a translation in English. Perseus provides two dictionaries too if you are reading or must consult a word in Latin or in Greek, it gives the etymology of the word as well its meaning using ancient sources as examples. It is really a good site. When i was researching Rome Civil War (69 A.D) and the Batavian Revolt i had to read Tacitus and i found my source both in Latin and in English there :)\nHere is the link for Perseus Digital Library: perseus.tufts.edu/hooper/", "created_utc": 1622042335, "distinguished": null, "id": "gziuevd", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/nlc0af/what_are_some_reliable_websites_and_or_sources/gziuevd/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "The question leaves open a wide and vague area for contemplation. Since, simply \"losing a battle\" is still a category of several possible outcomes and circumstances. There are many ways and extents to which one can \"lose\". And depending on the condition a general finds themselves in, the decisions they make will change accordingly. So, I will try and cover a number of circumstances I think fall into this category of \"losing\".\n\n\nLet's say that the army of the general is defeated but retreats in order : This can be a situation when the battle is especially hard fought, but the winning side, although inflicting significant losses upon the enemy, is unable to rout them, while the losing side has taken considerable losses and the general finds his situation untenable, therefore orders an organised and quite retreat after a day of battle, and retreats to a tactically conducive location, in order to collect the troops that had been routed during the battle. Here it must be kept in mind that routes weren't an individual phenomenon, meaning if a unit found it's situation untenable at a point of a battle and lost morale, the men would usually retreat in the same direction and would try and maintain themselves in a group. This would bolster their chances of fending off persuing enemy cavalry, of surviving and regrouping. This also meant that if a general wanted to find and regroup his scattered forces, he would not have to send thousands of cavalrymen in all direction to pick up individual men, but rather officers who would recognise and recollect their units that might have fled. \n\n\nLet's assume that this task is accomplished, now the general is left with a few options and these depend on the actions of the enemy and the tactical and geographical position of the general.\nFor example, we can assume that the enemy army after a day of battle, is probably tired, and will persue the beaten enemy to destroy him thoroughly, the next morning. This means that the general can and usually did force march his troops, to a tactically advantageous position, while still defending their capital, this can be a fort, a city, a geographically defensive position etc.\n\n\nNow, let's say that the army of the general was routed, which means units fled with little cohesion, and the general, either escaped with his guard or reserves or was captured. In case of capture, there is no more contemplation of strategy that we are concerned with. In case of the former, meaning let's say that the general did manage to retreat with his guard, he's left with limited options. He can retreat to a strong defensive position, again, fort, or city. He can try and regroup his armies as mentioned above or he can try and replenish his troops if he or his monarch can afford to do so, via mercenaries, calling forth reserves etc. If neither are viable options, well, then there's the option of doing what Babur and/or Maharana Pratap did. Abandon the capital, and then, either create a new centre of power from where you can hopefully reverse your losses as Babur did. Or, retreat to jungles and mountains, as Pratap did, and fight a long and sustained guerilla war, admittedly, this is a path that few kings or generals have followed and requires an amount of extraordinary willpower, charisma and skill.\n\n\nTo give you some context as to what Babur resorted to as a long term strategy here's some context. \nZahir-ud-din Mohammed Babur, was the eldest of Umar Sheikh Mirza, who was governor of Ferghana, which is a region in eastern Uzbekistan. Babur was by lineage the great-great grandson of Timur. Babur's early military career was full of frustrations. Born in 1483, he had assumed the Throne of his father at age 12, in the year 1494. He conquered Samarkand two years later, only to lose Fergana soon after. In his attempts to reconquer Fergana, he lost control of Samarkand. In 1501, his attempt to recapture both the regions failed when Muhammad Shaybani Khan the founder of the Shaybanid dynasty, defeated him. He conquered Kabul, in 1504, after having being driven away from his patrimony and homeland. He formed an alliance with the Safavid Shah Ismail I, to take parts of Turkestan as well as Samarkand itself only to lose them again to the Shaybanids.\n\nHence, he had decided to give up on the dreams of taking back Ferghana and Samarkand and set his eyes on North India. His idea was to establish himself in India, strengthen his forces and eventually take back his patrimony in central Asia, however he died before achieving this task. \n\nHere it would be prudent to discuss what Pratap accomplished after his defeat in the Battle of Haldighati as well. Raja Man Singh, the king of Amber, was the commander of the Mughal forces at Haldighati. Even after being defeated at Haldighati, where his army of 3000-4000 Rajputs and allied Bhils (400 men approx.), was defeated by Man Singh who commanded the Imperial Mughal Army roughly 8000-10,000 in numbers, Pratap Singh endured and by the end of his reign, he scored a decisive victory against the Mughals at Dewair in 1582 and took back Western Mewar including Kumbhalgarh, Udaipur and Gogunda through guerilla warfare and even destroyed newly built mosques in these regions in retaliation. He died in 1597.\n\nAfter his death, his son Maharana Amar Singh I (r. 1597-1620) assumed the Throne and followed his father's policy of resisting Mughal overlordship. Amar Singh continued to resist the Mughals and it was clear that he could not be taken in a battle, so Mewar was devastated financially and in manpower due to the policy of Shah Jahan (son of Jahangir, Jahangir had become Emperor in 1605 after Akbar's death) , to scorch the lands of Mewar and make it incapable of supporting the efforts of Amar Singh. Finally, in 1615, Amar Singh submitted to the Mughals. Mewar including Chittor was assigned to him as Watan Jagir or hereditary patrimony. He secured a favourable peace treaty and it was ensured that Mewar would never bend his knee to the Mughal Emperors or serve at his court personally nor would the House of Mewar enter into matrimonial relations with the Mughals.\n\n\nApart from these there's a number of other circumstances that the general may find themselves in. The enemy after confidently beating the general could shoot straight for their capital, which would either force the general to give battle or leave him with the prospect of either cutting of the enemy lines of supplies and waiting for them to give battle again or persue him or, in case the general is left with barely enough men to accomplish anything, either give up the capital and take either routes described above, or sue for peace. This scenario would be a result of error on part of the enemy however.\n\nThe enemy could also not be this obliging, meaning they could divide their forces, into a smaller contingent, strong enough to continue persuing the retreating or routing forces, while continuing on their way to the capital or simply follow the enemy general and meet them in the next field of battle.\n\nEither way the situation of a general after losing a battle is dangerous. Especially if the battle is decisive. Keep in mind, in India, such battles weren't usually what decided the outcomes of wars, since such battles would form a fraction of the military history of medieval India. While many a war were decided by a decisive battle, this wasn't the common trend of Warfare in the period. The bulk of warfare and military encounters in this period revolved around maneuvers, sieges, short engagements and ultimately making the war untenable for an enemy. This is what many generals tried to do during the Deccan Wars in which hundreds of forts would change hands between the Mughals and Marathas many times over. Maintaining reserves and harnessing the ability to mobilise reserves is a life saver in these circumstances. It's also important that the general not get killed or captured during the rout or retreat, since it could be equal to ending the war effort. It is for this reason, that successful generals, such as Babur or Akbar etc. Usually commanded from the rear or centre.\n\nI would recommend reading the following books which I have found quite useful in understanding medieval military strategy and tactics. \n\n\n\n\"Military history of India\" by Sir Jadunath Sarkar\n\n\n\"Thirty Decisive Battle of Jaipur\" by Narendra Singh (Rao Bahadur.)", "created_utc": 1622031639, "distinguished": null, "id": "gzi7bvv", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/mwwfq4/medieval_andor_ancient_history_your_army_has_just/gzi7bvv/", "score": 10 } ]

[ { "body": "Such complaints were probably always common.\n\nIn the Greek world (or at least in Classical Greek literature) elderly men were often stereotyped as rigid, suspicious, and stingy. In his *Rhetoric*, for example, Aristotle says:\n\n\"\\[Elderly men\\] have lived many years; they have often been taken in, and often made mistakes; and life on the whole is a bad business....They are cynical; that is, they tend to put the worse construction on everything. Further, their experience makes them distrustful and therefore suspicious of evil. Consequently they neither love warmly nor hate bitterly....They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive. They are not generous, because money is one of the things they must have....They are cowardly, and are always anticipating danger; unlike that of the young, who are warm-blooded, their temperament is chilly...\" (2.13 \\[1390a\\])\n\nThe same stereotypes are at work in Theophrastus' *Characters*, a short treatise that attempted (in good Aristotelian fashion) to categorize people into moral \"types.\" Theophastus' satirical portrait of old men attempting to act like young ones (\"late learners\") might reflect youthful criticisms: \n\n\"At the festivals of heroes \\[the late learner\\] will match himself against boys for a torch-race....he will go into the gymnasia and try wrestling matches....Riding into the country on another’s horse, he will practice his horsemanship by the way; and, falling, will break his head.....he will have matches of archery and javelin-throwing with his children’s attendant, whom he exhorts, at the same time, to learn from him, — as if the other knew nothing about it either. At the bath he will posture frequently...and when women are near, he will practice dancing-steps, singing his own accompaniment.\" (8)\n\nThese stereotypes about old men made their way into Greek New Comedy, and thus into Roman comedy. The Roman playwright Plautus, for example, repeatedly uses the stock character \"senex amator\" (the horny old man). \n\nProbably the closest approximation of an actual youthful outlook on old men in Roman literature, however, may be found in the poems of Catullus (who probably died at age 30). In his famous fifth poem, for example, Catullus, addressing his mistress, says:\n\nLet us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,\n\nand let us judge all the rumors of the old men\n\nto be worth just one penny! \n\n\\[in other words: let the old people gossip; let's make love\\]\n\n​", "created_utc": 1544459932, "distinguished": null, "id": "ebi53nq", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/a4vnuv/old_generations_complain_about_the_next_one_since/ebi53nq/", "score": 142 }, { "body": "This does not answer your question, but it is important to point out that is not an actual quote from Socrates, or indeed any ancient Greek. On the contrary, it is a quote that was intended to be a summary of general complaints about the youth by the ancient Greeks, as written in a 1907 dissertation by a student, Kenneth John Freeman. This is the original quote.\n\n>The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …\n\n>Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.\n\nSo while you are seeking the inverse, you should know the original technically didn't exist in the form you think it did. ", "created_utc": 1544460269, "distinguished": null, "id": "ebi5iu5", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/a4vnuv/old_generations_complain_about_the_next_one_since/ebi5iu5/", "score": 54 } ]

[ { "body": "A great question u/cactus_licker3 because it's obvious something changed, but (as with all historical questions) when we pry into the details it becomes so murky. Was homosexuality commonplace and accepted in much of ancient history? Yes and no. There have likely always been people who felt this way, who we today would call gay; as there have likely always been people who felt outside their culture's gender binary, who we today would call non-binary. These feelings occur statistically, and there's no reason to think they didn't appear historically as well. *But*, as you can tell, I'm side-stepping using these words outright, because to say someone \"was gay\" in X ancient society when 1) we can't ask them, and 2) their society doesn't even use that word...Well this is quite difficult. \n\nThere are some societies where people are/were *expected* to participate in homosexual relationships, but they didn't call it \"homosexuality.\" So we're in quite a bind, because we're saying to them: \"I know more about you than you did when you experienced it.\" The problem is that word and the identity it implies - prior to recently, there was no idea that individuals were 'a gay person.' Simply, people existed and made choices; this did not define their identity nor did it change their identity in relation to other 'straight people.' *Except sometimes*, when individuals appear to create an identity around their sexuality *in opposition to* their society's ambivalence. So are these people the actual gays, and everyone else are just straight people who bend the rules? This is an impossible question to answer.\n\nBasically all of history is comprised of small egalitarian communities, and in these places it seems obvious that sexuality wasn't restricted by Christianity. So then, the answer to your question is *yes it was accepted*. But when people talk about ancient history, they often mean *the last few thousand years* which saw the rise of \"civilizations\" etc (another contentious word), and in these hierarchical and male-dominated societies we do see some version of a \"homosexual identity\" created and sidelined in opposition to heterosexual normalcy. But of course, this varies by time and place. \n\nWhat contributed to it becoming so demonized, and did homophobia exist in Greco-Roman culture? These are related, because Romans would've said that homosexuality was *unnatural* and today we'd call this homophobia. Of course, this did not stop some Romans, but this attitude was reinforced (and encoded into law) when everyone converted to Christianity...and such laws would stay in Europe til the late 1700's. I've talked about this transformation from Roman bias to Christian law [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hcltyt/was_the_repression_of_homosexuality_in_christian/).\n\nThere have been innumerable threads on this sub about sexuality, so there is much to delve into... \n\n- [Were ancient people gay?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/kqkmk3/historians_say_they_were_just_friends_but_they/gi5b1yp/) by u/bakeseal and u/Hoyarugby \n\n**My Posts / Indigenous**\n\n- [African lesbianism & female husbands, pt. 1](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fhnkqf/what_roles_and_relationships_were_available_to/) and [pt. 2](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fl7tbk/how_and_why_did_queen_nzinga_of_ndongo_and/)\n\n- [Aka foragers lack of homosexuality except as child's play](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fanssm/have_sleep_patterns_always_been_the_same_i_read/fj1ejya/)\n\nAnd other sources...\n\n- [Boy Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities](http://www.arcados.ch/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/MURRAY-ROSCOE-BOY-WIVES-FEMALE-HUSBANDS-98.pdf)\n\n- [King Ahebi Ugbabe: Sex, Gender, and Power in Colonial Nigeria](https://digpodcast.org/2018/03/25/female-king-ahebi-ugbabe/) by Averill Earls\n\n- [The \"Deviant\" African Genders that Colonialism Condemned](https://daily.jstor.org/the-deviant-african-genders-that-colonialism-condemned/) by Mohammed Elnaiem\n\nAside from my posts, here's just *a few* from others on this wonderful sub...\n\n- [Nahua/Aztec homosexuality](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7hvw59/how_was_homosexuality_generally_viewed_by_native/) by u/400-Rabbits \n\n- [Third genders & homosexuality in the Americas, Nahua/Aztec and Inca](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gz1hjw/how_much_is_western_colonialism_responsible_for/fthcbyn/) by u/Kelpie-Cat\n\n- [Indonesian third genders](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bj9wpt/indonesia_has_a_long_history_of_a_third_gender/em7j8k3/) by u/KippyPowers\n\n- [Chinese homosexuality](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/osu201/is_homophobia_in_china_primarily_a_result_of/) by u/TheGayBizz\n\nAnd other sources...\n\n- [Gender Transformations in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies](https://www.sidestone.com/books/gender-transformations-in-prehistoric-and-archaic-societies) ed. by Koch & Kirleis\n\n- [What Ancient Gender Fluidity Taught Me About Modern Patriarchy (La Tolita culture)](https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/archaeology-biases/) by M. F. Ugalde\n\n- *Taking a Deep Dive into Indigenous Gender & Sexuality* by Veritas et Caritas, [Pt. 1: Misrepresentations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f7F9q4-nZc) \n\n- [Pt. 2: Indigenous Views](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlXaOxe0h3U)\n\n- [Pt. 3: Aboriginal Australians](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbowHKgSvz0)\n\n- [Life of a Wakashu, Japan's Third Gender](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzG4UOaGy7M) by Linfamy\n\n**Greco-Roman**\n\n- [Ancient Greek homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7lnrh5/how_common_was_homosexuality_or_what_wed_now_see/drptkm5/) by u/cleopatra_philopater \n\n- [Greco-Roman homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/h9tw0c/does_western_sexual_prudishness_such_as_shame/) by u/semajijohn \n\n- [Greco-Roman homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/czaasq/were_samesex_relationships_openly_practised_in/) by u/boo_cait\n\n- [Greco-Roman homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k0clsp/how_did_the_romans_and_ancients_greeks_really/gdhrkdm/) by u/Jalsavrah\n\n- [Roman homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dw27v9/what_are_the_historical_origins_of_homophobia/f7hoan2/) by u/Steelcan909 and u/sunagainstgold \n\n- [Roman homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hg8r5i/were_samesex_relationships_really_tolerated_in/) by u/i8i0 \n\n- [Roman homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/flmgm4/what_did_roman_law_say_about_gay_marriage/) by u/WelfOnTheShelf \n\n- [Greco-Roman sex/gender swapping in myth](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k1vy7t/what_was_the_ancient_greeks_explanation_for_the/) by u/Ratyrel\n\n- [Roman gendered nouns & Attis as trans](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/h7kal4/did_latin_really_used_to_have_gender_neutral/) by u/UndercoverClassicist\n\nAnd other sources...\n\n- *The influence of Roman laws regarding same-sex acts on homophobia in Africa* by Susan Haskins http://www.saflii.org/za/journals/AHRLJ/2014/21.html \n\n- [Roman Sex, Sexuality, Slaves, and Lex Scantinia](https://www.heritagedaily.com/2018/01/roman-sex-sexuality-slaves-and-lex-scantinia/97996) by Markus Milligan\n\n- [Is Arsenokoitai really that mysterious?](https://www.equip.org/article/is-arsenokoitai-really-that-mysterious/) by C. W. Mayhall\n\n**Medieval**\n\n- [Islamic Golden Age homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/jfsa6s/what_were_the_views_of_homosexuality_during_the/) by u/Kelpie-Cat \n\n- [Islamic Andalusian homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/izl3py/crusader_kings_iiimedieval_period_flair_panel_ama/g6p2ycj/?context=3) by u/Kelpie-Cat \n\n- [Medieval homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i5fqs5/in_ken_folletts_world_without_end_a_main/) by u/GlampingNotCamping\n\n- [Medieval homosexuality 1](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dw27v9/what_are_the_historical_origins_of_homophobia/f7gl4ne/) and [2](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i3lef5/when_and_why_did_homosexuality_become_a_taboo/g0clgn7/) by u/sunagainstgold \n\n- [Medieval homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/igt0hk/were_there_any_noticeable_instances_of_samesex/) by u/concinnityb\n\n- [Medieval homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hsic2v/if_one_were_caught_engaging_in_a_homosexual_act/) by u/BRIStoneman \n\n- [Medieval homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hi3byl/when_did_catholic_confession_become_a_private/) by u/CrankyFederalist\n\nAnd other sources...\n\n- [The Experience of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages](https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/pwh/gaymidages.asp) by Paul Halsall \n\n- *Take up Riper Practices: The Gay Love Letters of Some Medieval Clerics* by Rictor Norton http://rictornorton.co.uk/medieval.htm\n\n- [The Vikings & Homosexuality](https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/pwh/gayvik.asp) by Gunnora Hallakarva\n\n**Early Modern and Recent**\n\n- [English Early Modern homosexuality & Roman galli priests](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/h0bnr6/short_answers_to_simple_questions_june_10_2020/fv046kk/?context=3) by u/concinnityb \n\n- [British Victorian homosexuality](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/os82zm/ive_been_reading_about_edward_carpenter_the_19th/) by u/smrzj \n\n- [Ottoman homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gtkn23/in_1858_the_ottoman_empire_legalized/) with answers by u/paxottomanica, u/Chamboz, and u/gamegyro56\n\n- (related) [What Ottoman erotica teaches us about sexual pluralism](https://aeon.co/ideas/what-ottoman-erotica-teaches-us-about-sexual-pluralism) by Irvin Cemil Schick\n\n- [Communist Cuban homosexuality](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hhz49v/did_che_guevara_really_made_forced_labours_for/) by u/flesh_eating_turtle", "created_utc": 1606794449, "distinguished": null, "id": "ge849t4", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/k0tufn/it_seems_to_me_that_throughout_much_of_ancient/ge849t4/", "score": 17 } ]

[ { "body": "We haven't stopped \"creating\" divine figures. Even in monotheistic religions you can create new divinities, or at least psuedo-divinities. In Christianity, specifically Catholicism, we see this in the canonization of new saints. These saints become symbols of protection and essentially take on the roles of minor, household or patron deities. Pope Francis has canonized 55 saints and while some won't gain much status, others like Mother Teresa were [already being deified](https://www.rediff.com/news/special/for-kolkata-mother-teresa-was-always-a-saint/20160903.htm) before their canonization.\n\nThe other modern example is Hinduism. Hinduism is an old set of religious beliefs and traditions, many of which are polytheistic of a kind. But it is not just an old, ancient set of practices, these traditions are living and we can see examples of the creation of new deities or traditions in the present. There are a few examples in more modern times that might help you. \n\nOne is [Shirdi Sai Baba](https://www.sai.org.in/) (1838-1918). He was originally a guru/fakir and gained a massive following while he was alive. During his life, and especially after, he became deified and is now worshiped by many. There are a few important notes here though. One is that many worship him not as a god, but as a guru and in a lot of Hindu traditions, you worship your guru. This is seen as showing respect to the person who is teaching and raising you. So for these people, he is not seen as a god, but an enlightened teacher. For others however, he is a god, either in his own right or as an incarnation of Dattatreya. He is also revered by Muslims as well in the capacity of a saint, similar to in Christianity.\n\nThe next is [Swaminarayan](https://www.baps.org/) (1781-1830). He was a yogi who taught that there was a Supreme Deity that had a physical manifestation (This still jives with having multiple gods. Hinduism is complicated). He is worshiped as an Earthly manifestation of that god.\n\nThere is also [Kaival](https://kaival.org/). Kaival is not a person, it is a conception of a Supreme Creator without form (Again, Hinduism is complicated). This idea was brought forth by Karunasagar in the late 18th century. Karunasagar is not worshiped as a god, but instead is thought of as a divine messenger. The followers say they pray to his image to use it as a crutch, because it is difficult to conceive or understand of a formless creator.\n\nThe last is [Santoshi Maa](http://www.pragatsantoshimata.com/). She was a goddess created in the 1960s and then later popularized by the movie *Jai Santoshi Maa*. She is a new goddess that has no real ties in older scripture, but has become massively popular. \n\nI was gonna end this, but I realized that I do have ancient examples as well and I don't want to delete everything I wrote so time to go back to Ancient Greece.\n\nHermes is said to basically be the deified version of the [herma](https://www.pudel.samerski.de/pdf/HESTIA.pdf), or rock road markers often with a phallus. One theory as pesented in \"Woden, Hermes and Pushan\" is that Hermes split off from Pan who was in turn a derivation of a PIE god. The theory says that Pan was originally a god of forests and travelers and as such he was associated with the herma and gained an epithet. That epithet split off to become Hermes and took most of his divine sphere with him.\n\nI also know that Hades is not attested in the Mycenean inscriptions, but I know nothing about his origins.\n\nHope this helps a bit", "created_utc": 1595007974, "distinguished": null, "id": "fydq5nc", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/hsrd2j/how_were_new_gods_created_in_ancient_history_do/fydq5nc/", "score": 9 }, { "body": "There is the case of the Egyptian god Aten.\n\n\nOriginally, Aten was nothing more than the \"disc\" of the sun; a minor aspect of the Egyptian god Ra. This \"disc\" referred to anything flat and circular; the sun was called the \"disc of the day\" while the moon was called the \"silver disc of the night\". The first mention of Aten, as anything more than Ra's disc, was in ancient Egypt's 12th dynasty in which a deceased king rose to the heavens and merged with Him (ie: the story of Sinuhe).\n\n\nIt was only in the 18th dynasty, under the reigns of Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten that Aten rose to a prominent - supreme - role in Egyptian society. Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten even created a new city (the city of Akhetaten) to devote to Aten.\n\n-----\nIf you mean within the context of the religion itself, then yes. There's numerous cases in Greek mythology - like the birth of Athena or Hercules.", "created_utc": 1594992671, "distinguished": null, "id": "fycvq49", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/hsrd2j/how_were_new_gods_created_in_ancient_history_do/fycvq49/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "There is an excellent writeup from /u/commiespaceinvader about a nationalist pseudo-history in Hungary, which claims that the Sumerians became Scythians, Scythians became Hungarians, and also Jesus was a Scythian. Therefore Hungarians are descendants of the inventors of civilization and also Jesus.\n\nhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7eynk8/was_there_a_theory_about_jesus_being_hungarian/\n\nIt also has some relevant discussion about why these myths can emerge in \"lesser\" powers like Hungary or Korea, which do not have the same founding myths and ancient lineage as lets say France or China.", "created_utc": 1531259021, "distinguished": null, "id": "e25kn2y", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/8xni80/is_other_countries_have_fake_ancient_history/e25kn2y/", "score": 29 }, { "body": "If you had not been writing this from Korea, I would have recommended you read Hyung-Il Pai's *Constructing \"Korean\" Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories*.\n\nBut yes, these nationalistic, ethnocentric interpretations of history happen all over the world. And it's important to note that these are not new developments either. Scholars were often paid in the past to aggrandize and link their patrons to whichever mythological or historical figure they wished as an ancestor. Geoffrey of Monmouth's *The History of the Kings of Britain*, which introduced King Arthur to the wider world, was written to provide a history for the Norman conquerors for example. \n\nIf you'd like some examples from around the world, I recommend the book edited by Kohl and Fawcett *Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology*. ", "created_utc": 1531285148, "distinguished": null, "id": "e26bhfb", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/8xni80/is_other_countries_have_fake_ancient_history/e26bhfb/", "score": 12 }, { "body": "I think this counts\n\nhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4brxf0/did_people_truly_believe_black_people_were/?st=jjgkyhgi&sh=13e666bc\n\n\nThere were a sizable amount of pro-slavery individuals/slave owners that justified their belief that Africans should/deserved to be enslaved because they claimed that africans were 'descended from cain' and thus this was their punishment from god, that their souls were tainted etc", "created_utc": 1531280836, "distinguished": null, "id": "e267v1m", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/8xni80/is_other_countries_have_fake_ancient_history/e267v1m/", "score": 4 } ]

[ { "body": "The [oldest known written joke](https://www.wlv.ac.uk/news-and-events/latest-news/2008/august-2008/the-worlds-ten-oldest-jokes-revealed.php) is from ancient Sumeria and was written down about 1900BCE. [It's a fart joke](https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-joke-life/worlds-oldest-joke-traced-back-to-1900-bc-idUKL129052420080731?edition-redirect=uk). The oldest \"rule of three\" joke we know of dates to about 1200BCE in Mesopotamia. There are also other entries from Egypt, Greece, and Rome.", "created_utc": 1611374395, "distinguished": null, "id": "gkahe3r", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/l2mqvi/are_there_any_writings_of_jokeshumour_from/gkahe3r/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "For Anatolia, I recommend combining Trevor Bryce's [*Warriors of Anatolia: A Concise History of the Hittites*](https://books.google.com/books?id=XO2ODwAAQBAJ) with [*Ancient Turkey*](https://books.google.com/books?id=SsLKBgAAQBAJ) by Antonio Sagona and Paul Zimansky. All of Bryce's books on ancient Anatolia are excellent, but he has always relied much more heavily on texts than archaeology, so the more archaeologically inclined volume by Sagona and Zimansky complements his history of the Hittites very nicely. \n\n[*In the Land of a Thousand Gods: A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World*](https://books.google.com/books?id=yOo9DwAAQBAJ) by Christian Marek is an excellent introduction to ancient Anatolia through the Roman period, but it is a rather dry read. \n\nVan de Mieroop's history of Mesopotamia is an excellent place to start, as you've already discovered. I also recommend [*The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy*](https://books.google.com/books?id=_EtJAgAAQBAJ) by Mario Liverani. For Assyria and Babylonia specifically, see [*Ancient Assyria: A Very Short Introduction*](https://books.google.com/books?id=_rlpBgAAQBAJ) and [*A Short History of Babylon*](https://books.google.com/books?id=rq_RDwAAQBAJ), both by Karen Radner. \n\nBottero's [*Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia*](https://books.google.com/books?id=0ub6wAEACAAJ) is by far the best introduction to Mesopotamian religion, but [*The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion*](https://books.google.com/books?id=bZT57A8ioCkC) is still well worth a read. Oppenheim's section on \"Why a 'Mesopotamian Religion' should not be written\" in [*Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization*](https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/publications/misc/ancient-mesopotamia-portrait-dead-civilization) (free PDF) is also a classic.\n\nShaw's edited volume on Egyptian history is good but increasingly dated. Van de Mieroop's [*A History of Ancient Egypt*](https://books.google.com/books?id=acT0GQfclFkC) and Wilkinson's [*The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt*](https://books.google.com/books?id=P07rgiJjsk4C) are used more often for Egyptian history courses these days. As a first introduction to Egypt, however, I recommend [*Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs*](https://books.google.com/books?id=9oAZEyiyvT0C) and [*Red Land, Black Land*](https://books.google.com/books?id=Vs6xBkWiT7YC) by Barbara Mertz. Also check out the excellent [History of Egypt podcast](https://egyptianhistorypodcast.com/), though it is currently only up to the 18th Dynasty. \n\nAncient Egyptian religion is a very complex subject, and no single book can do the subject justice. I provided a lengthy list of reading suggestions [in a recent post](https://old.reddit.com/r/ancientegypt/comments/gnjlzt/beginner_guides_to_learning_about_ancient/fra3r2j/). \n\nAs an alternative to Martin's book on ancient Greece, I recommend Edith Hall's [*Introducing the Ancient Greeks*](https://books.google.com/books?id=dq5bAwAAQBAJ), which is a very engaging overview of ancient Greece that manages to incorporate a surprising amount of information without getting too bogged down in details.", "created_utc": 1591239168, "distinguished": null, "id": "fstiot9", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/gutgxr/ancient_history_books_recommendations/fstiot9/", "score": 2 }, { "body": "It looks like your list includes quite a variety of texts, and that you’re interested in both primary and secondary sources, your list also includes both secular and religious works, so I’m assuming your interest in ancient history is in a more general sense (that is, you’re interested in politics, religion, and general lifestyles of ancient societies rather than just focusing on one aspect of history). There are quite a few books I think I can recommend related to your interest, some of these I have read, so I can confidently recommend them to you, some of them I have not read, but I believe they would still be relevant for what you’re looking for (titles in **bold** indicate texts I have read ,titles in *italics* are texts I have not read)\n\n**General History**\n\nTom Head, **World History 101** (general history of the world from the start of human civilization until the 2010s, target audience are readers who have little to no prior knowledge of history)\n\n*The History Book* (similar concept to World History 101)\n\n**Mesopotamia**\n\n**Enuma Elish** (this is a Mesopotamian creation story, there are multiple versions of the story, the most common one to find is the Babylonian version. It contains the creation of the world and various gods, and the war in Heaven between Tiamat (the embodiment of chaos), and the head of the gods (in the Babylonian version, it is Marduk). *Enuma Elish* is a rather brief text, it is only about 40 or 50 pages).\n\nStephen Bourke *The Middle East: The Cradle of Civilization Revealed*\n\nIt should also be noted that there is more than one version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. When referring to the “Epic of Gilgamesh” it is usually the Standard Babylonian Version (c. 1300 BC) which is being invoked. The Standard Babylonian Version was written in the Akkadian language, and is a unified text chronicling the story of Gilgamesh from beginning to end. There are also, however, much older versions of the epic, the Old Babylonian Version, or *Surpassing All Other Kings* (c. 1800 BC) is another unified version of the story, the Old Babylonian Version, however, contains many more missing fragments than the Standard Babylonian Version. There are versions of Gilgamesh’s story even older than that, such as the ones written in the Sumerian language (its origins as far back as the third millennium BC), the Sumerian version of the story of Gilgamesh is contained in a series of seemingly unrelated tablets (differing the Sumerian version of Gilgamesh from the unified Babylonian versions). If you can only read one version of Gilgamesh, I would recommend the Standard Babylonian Version, but the older versions are also really useful to read if you wish to see how the Gilgamesh story developed over time.\n\n**The Bible** (It is rather difficult to find copies of the Bible that only contain the Old Testament, even more so if you wish to also buy one with Dore’s illustrations. If you are interested in extending the historical time periods you are learning about, then I would recommend reading both the Old and New Testament. If you are only interested in learning about events before 500 BC (as your post implies) then the New Testament will likely not be very engaging to you (as it was written in and takes place entirely within the first century AD). The Old Testament is useful in learning about Ancient Near Eastern societies (especially Israel and Judah), it also contains a lot of information on the geography of Canaan (it should be noted, however, that the culture of the Canaanites, their religion, and practices, are not elaborated much in the Old Testament, it is quite clear that the authors of the Old Testament did not like the religion and cultural practices of the Canaanites, and so specific details of the lifestyle of the Canaanites are often exaggerated for the sake of presenting Canaan as evil. Though the King James Version (1611) is the most widely read English translation, the New Revised Standard Version (1989) is usually the modern academic preference. I would recommend reading a modern translation, as the King James Version uses archaic language that can be difficult to understand)\n\n**Egypt**\n\nPenguin Classics, *Writings from Ancient Egypt* (it’s what it sounds like, a compilation of various writings from the Old, Middle, and New Kingdom periods of Ancient Egypt. To my knowledge, the wrigins presented by Penguin are both secular (such as Egyptian accounts of the Battle of Megiddo against the Canaanites in 15th century BC) and religious (various hymns to the gods)\n\nI would also recommend reading at least one version of the Egyptian *Book of the Dead* if you’re specifically interested in Egyptian religion\n\n**Greece**\n\nIf you’re looking for general history, the writings of I would recommend the writings of Herodotus and Thucydides\\*.\\*\n\nHerodotus’ **Histories** is quite fascinating, the main narrative is that of the Greco-Persian Wars in the 5th century BC, but the first half of Herodotus’ text is concerned with providing an extensive account on the rise of the Persian Empire (especially the life of Cyrus the Great), and the history and culture of various nations conquered by the Persian Empire (Herodotus dedicates the entirety of book two of the *Histories* to the geography, practices, and history of ancient Egypt, from its first Pharaoh, until the Persian conquest by Cambyses II). Herodotus provides a fascinating Greek perspective of the Persians, Scythians, and Egyptians. You should be cautious at times when reading Herodotus, however, as his history becomes much less reliable the farther back in time his narrative goes.\n\nOn the mythology side of things, the tragic plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are a tremendous source of Greek mythology\n\nAeschylus’ **Oresteia** trilogy is the only complete Ancient Greek trilogy to survive (the trilogy tells the story of Agamemnon’s murder by his wife Clytemnestra upon his return from the Trojan War, the vengeance Agamemnon’s son Orestes takes against Clytemnestra and her accomplice, and the retribution Orestes faces for killing his own mother).\n\nSophocles’ **Oedipus the King** tells of the rise and fall of the Theban king Oedipus, Sophocles’ **Antigone** takes place after Oedipus’ death, and is about his daughter Antigone, who is in a moral dilemma, her brothers Eteocles and Polynices had killed each other as they fought on opposing sides of a war, though King Creon of Thebes allows Eteocles to be given a proper burial, he forbids the same burial for Polynices, as he fought against the king of Thebes.\n\nEuripides’ **Bacchae** tells the story of Dionysus spreading his cult to Thebes.\n\nI would also recommend reading some of Aristophanes’ comedies (though he was active slightly after 500 BC). Greek comedies, unlike tragedies, are based on original stories by the playwright, rather than stories from mythology. Aristophanes’ plays are full of political commentary and banter, all throughout his plays, Athenian politicians from his time are regularly named and criticized, Aristophanes is especially critical of those whom he perceives as having a bad influence on the youth (his play **The Clouds** contains the earliest surviving reference we have to Socrates, the philosopher is mocked throughout almost the entire play). I was surprised at how genuinely hilarious his plays are, they are also incredibly vulgar and offensive, if I were to compare Aristophanes’ plays to anything, they are like reading South Park scripts from 400 BC.", "created_utc": 1591298178, "distinguished": null, "id": "fsw3t7i", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/gutgxr/ancient_history_books_recommendations/fsw3t7i/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "Let me start by noting I am not an expert at Asian history. I have a degree in ancient history that focussed on the classical Greeks and Romans.\n\nHowever there are a number of things at play, some I learned in uni, some from further reading.\n\nFirst is the preservation of written histories. To the extent that written history is preserved, it tends to be from dryer regions...this is why we have littler written evidence from Celtic Britain or the vikings, despite us knowing that they did indeed have a written language.\n\nSo as you move into wetter climes, we become more and more reliant on archaeological evidence which is not as capable at helping us understand thought and scope in history, and so narratives like we have from Greece, Rome or Egypt are much more difficult\n\nWith regards Greece and Rome dominance in terms of our history, written comes in, but so to does their cultures being fairly extant for centuries.\n\nIn many parts of the world temples were looted, palaces burned, etc on a very frequent basis. Kingdoms rose and fell, religions replaced consistently, barbarian (for want of a better phrase) sacking and pillaging, etc. This was true, I believe, for the areas you mentioned \n\nRome, by contrast, essentially has lasted pretty much indefinitely, and Greece to a slightly lesser extent (though the Minoans and mycaeneans, not so much).\n\nThere is also western bias. Greece and Rome have given us much of our philosophies, government styles and the like - so it's easy for us in the west to understand and relate to them in a way we don't understand ancient China for example.\n\nSo, as with much of history, and especially ancient history, the answer is: for a bunch of reasons", "created_utc": 1601921690, "distinguished": null, "id": "g7t9vsf", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/j5feoh/prevalence_of_eastern_mediterraneanwestern_asian/g7t9vsf/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "The answer to this question is quite complex and depends not only on the historian, but also what particular bit of history we are talking about. Between the things everyone agrees are \"real history\" (eg the existence of Julius Caesar) and things everyone agrees are mythical (eg Romulus) there is a lot of grey area. For example, the Greek historian Polybius recorded the text of several treaties between Rome and Carthage, the oldest from about 500 BCE. As far as I am aware there is not much debate on whether or not these are real it is broadly agreed that Polybius was not simply lying. This treaty gives a pretty interesting and revealing picture of Rome's position in the western Mediterranean from an early point, but it was also more or less contemporaneous with the story of the Rape of Lucretia and the expulsion of the Tarquins by Brutus, and the subsequent war with Lars Porsenna, which are generally agreed to have been, at the very least, heavily mythologized. So from one perspective we can say we have important and accurate information about Rome in 500, but from another we can say that period is essentially mythical. Adding archaeology into this mix only adds further wrinkles.\n\nThere are even less exaggerated examples, to give one, everyone agrees that the First Punic War happened, and everyone agrees on the broad outline of its course (very broad, unfortunately for such an important conflict we have rather scanty information), but there are quite a few details people wrangle over, from the question of whether the *corvus* was an actual thing, to the story about the Romans building their navy by reverse engineering a crashed Carthaginian ship (which I think is utter nonsense but it gets repeated), to the black hole that is our understanding of the Carthaginian side of things. And then things like Caesar's Gallic campaigns being pretty well understood, but were there *really* several hundred thousand Gallic warriors at Alesia? Feels kind of dubious.\n\nBeyond that, a few rapid fire dates that are often given for this sort of \"start of real Roman history\":\n\n390 BCE: the sack of Rome by the Gauls supposedly destroyed the old records of the city, urning events prior into dressed up myths.\n\n312 BCE: censorship of Appius Claudius, and epigraphically attested figure who gets arguably the first really human portrait in Roman history.\n\n290 BCE: the Pyrrhic War, when Rome entered into the Greek political environment.\n\n264 BCE: Start of the First Punic War, but more importantly when the surviving text of Polybius, generally considered the most reliable early historian of Rome, picks up.\n\nSo pick your poison.\n\nA good source for this is TJ Cornell's *Origins of Rome*, he is generally unusually credulous of early sources but in building his case he really drills down into the sources' sources' sources, so to speak.", "created_utc": 1533659805, "distinguished": null, "id": "e3rr96b", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/95bnm2/modern_historians_often_doubt_the_historicity_of/e3rr96b/", "score": 31 } ]

[ { "body": "[*Ancient Civilizations*](https://books.google.com/books?id=isxbCgAAQBAJ) by Chris Scarre and Brian Fagan is a pretty good overview of the best attested ancient societies. I also highly recommend the superb exhibition catalogues produced by the Met Museum, both of which are available for free:\n\n* [*Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus*](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Art_of_the_First_Cities_The_Third_Millennium_BC_from_the_Mediterranean_to_the_Indus) \n\n* [*Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.*](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Beyond_Babylon_Art_Trade_and_Diplomacy_in_the_Second_Millenium_BC)\n\nVan de Mieroop's [*A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC*](https://books.google.com/books?id=MrIOCgAAQBAJ) is the best place to start for the ancient Near East. I also recommend [*The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy*](https://books.google.com/books?id=_EtJAgAAQBAJ) by Mario Liverani. For Assyria and Babylonia specifically, see [*Ancient Assyria: A Very Short Introduction*](https://books.google.com/books?id=_rlpBgAAQBAJ) and [*A Short History of Babylon*](https://books.google.com/books?id=rq_RDwAAQBAJ), both by Karen Radner. \n\nVan de Mieroop's [*A History of Ancient Egypt*](https://books.google.com/books?id=acT0GQfclFkC) and Wilkinson's [*The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt*](https://books.google.com/books?id=P07rgiJjsk4C) are the usual books used in Egyptian history courses. As a first introduction to Egypt, however, I recommend [*Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs*](https://books.google.com/books?id=9oAZEyiyvT0C) and [*Red Land, Black Land*](https://books.google.com/books?id=Vs6xBkWiT7YC) by Barbara Mertz. Also check out the excellent [History of Egypt podcast](https://egyptianhistorypodcast.com/), though it is currently only up to the 18th Dynasty. \n\nFor ancient Anatolia, I recommend combining Trevor Bryce's [*Warriors of Anatolia: A Concise History of the Hittites*](https://books.google.com/books?id=XO2ODwAAQBAJ) with [*Ancient Turkey*](https://books.google.com/books?id=SsLKBgAAQBAJ) by Antonio Sagona and Paul Zimansky. All of Bryce's books on ancient Anatolia are excellent, but he has always relied much more heavily on texts than archaeology, so the more archaeologically inclined volume by Sagona and Zimansky complements his history of the Hittites very nicely. \n\nEdith Hall's [*Introducing the Ancient Greeks*](https://books.google.com/books?id=dq5bAwAAQBAJ) is a very engaging overview of ancient Greece that manages to incorporate a surprising amount of information without getting too bogged down in details.\n\nSee the [AskHistorians reading list](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/middleeast) for more suggestions.", "created_utc": 1599575552, "distinguished": null, "id": "g4fzym0", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/iot6v5/studying_ancient_history/g4fzym0/", "score": 4 } ]

[ { "body": "To those who are reporting this thread, we appreciate your diligence and vigilance. You are correct that normally these threads are against the rules due to the 20 year rule. Thank you. However, we have decided to allow this thread as it pertains to public history.", "created_utc": 1425754539, "distinguished": "moderator", "id": "cp7fx4a", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2y8s0x/just_how_bad_is_the_situation_in_iraqsyria_in/cp7fx4a/", "score": 179 }, { "body": "There are some posts worth checking out on the [Conflict Antiquities blog](https://conflictantiquities.wordpress.com/). [Here](https://conflictantiquities.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/iraq-mosul-museum-nergal-gate-nineveh-destruction/) he goes through the video and talks about what were original and what were replicas. That site also discusses the antiquities trade and tries to figure out how ISIS is using that.\n\n[This is a good article](https://www.academia.edu/7543601/Satellite-Based_Monitoring_of_Looting_and_Damage_to_Archaeological_Sites_in_Syria) that tries to figure out all the looting that has gone on since the start of the Syrian civil war. ISIS isn't the only group destroying sites.\n\nThose links will show you that there are a number of things happening.\n\nThere is the destruction that is happening because of the bombing, shooting, etc.\nThere is the destruction in setting up bases and fortifications.\nThere is the looting of artifacts in order to sell them on the black market.\nThen, there is the destruction of artifacts for ideological/propaganda purposes by ISIS.\n\nIn short, it's bad and it's not confined to ISIS. We won't know the full extent of the damage until some time after this conflict is over.\n\nI'm sure there are others more qualified to discuss this than me. I mostly just wanted to point you in the direction of some resources that may be helpful. But I suppose I should make some comment about ISIS specifically. I'm really not sure what to say about what ISIS is doing to the cultural heritage of Syria and Iraq. Of course, it is terrible. But my mind is not made up. Should I be more outraged about them than with what other actors in the conflict are doing? How should I compare what ISIS did in their video to the destruction caused by bombs on the Aleppo citadel? Should I just say that all of it is just bad? Should I try to place these things on some sliding scale of horribleness? What reports can be believed? Should it matter that the motivations of ISIS are harder for me to understand than those of others in this war? Part of me wonders what Ashurnasirpal II would think about all of this? Is what is happening in Syria and Iraq just part of what happens throughout history?\n\nBut this war mostly just makes me sad. Sad for the people caught up in it. Sad for the world.\n\nEdit: I did the links wrong.", "created_utc": 1425790223, "distinguished": null, "id": "cp7wbos", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2y8s0x/just_how_bad_is_the_situation_in_iraqsyria_in/cp7wbos/", "score": 42 } ]

[ { "body": "We don't know the answer to either part of the question! It's an ongoing scholarly controversy, outlined by u/hillsonghoods in his [Monday Methods post on premodern PTSD](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9mdx60/monday_methods_on_why_did_ancient_warriors_get/). Some scholars claim that they can identify PTSD symptoms related to war trauma in accounts of the personality and behaviour of ancient warriors. Others claim that this evidence is way too thin to support the diagnosis, and we have good reasons to believe that their experience of war was different enough that they wouldn't have suffered the same kinds of trauma that modern soldiers do.\n\nFundamental to both sides is whether it is possible, and if so, whether it is ethical to diagnose people in the past with a disorder that wasn't understood or recognised as such in their own time. After all, as explained in the post linked above, it is a conscious and deliberate decision to define certain groups of symptoms as a coherent disorder, and PTSD was specifically defined in order to give American Vietnam veterans the treatment they needed. PTSD is not a timeless reality that simply needs a label; it is a particular way to frame and treat responses to traumatic experience. It can be extremely helpful for sufferers of PTSD to learn that they aren't alone, and to come to terms with their trauma by learning about the experiences of others. But we have to recognise that trauma is differently defined and treated in different periods of the past, and if we don't have the same diagnostic framework in place we can't confidently say that the things we find are the same as what we call PTSD.\n\nThis is why the most recent scholarship on premodern war trauma has turned away from the \"is this PTSD?\" parlour game, and instead looks at the way responses to trauma and moral injury were described and treated *historically*, rather than projecting our own understanding onto the past. We can certainly see people changed after traumatic experiences in all documented eras of history. We can learn a lot by analysing how those changes were perceived and whether people who had suffered trauma received any support or special status. We can't learn much by saying \"this is PTSD but they just didn't know it yet.\"", "created_utc": 1558877403, "distinguished": null, "id": "eouq2q9", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/bt7on7/have_veterans_and_soldiers_always_been_at_risk_of/eouq2q9/", "score": 35 } ]

[ { "body": "You may wish to read the [Monday Method's thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9mdx60/monday_methods_on_why_did_ancient_warriors_get/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=AskHistorians&utm_content=t1_fmbq6lr) by u/hillsonghoods on pre-modern PTSD, and the problems with discussing psychological phenomenon in the pre-modern world. [Another answer](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fu74vp/how_was_ptsd_handled_during_medieval_times/) by u/Antiquarianism goes into great detail about medieval stress, and there are also links in that thread to other, similarly worthy answers on the subject of PTSD in pre-modern times.", "created_utc": 1586989092, "distinguished": null, "id": "fnizdiz", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/g1yuwk/its_already_established_that_there_are_records_of/fnizdiz/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "Hi there!\n\nWe flaired users here at AskHistorians actually compile and maintain a [booklist](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books). I suspect you may find [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/general) section on general history informative. I might also flag [the Oxford Illustrated History of the World](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/general), as it sounds like it might be the sort of thing you have in mind.\n\nCheers!", "created_utc": 1586805143, "distinguished": null, "id": "fnawob3", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/g0i6t1/whats_a_good_history_textbook_one_that_goes_from/fnawob3/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "This is a good question with no possible good answer. In each case, the variables were different, and we should add to this the hypothesized \"migration\" of the Proto-Indo-Europeans into Europe, from some homeland variously located in the western Russia forested steppe or perhaps from Anatolia. Nobody really knows exactly how it happened, but the linguistic data demands a \"homeland\" of some sort. If that is the case, and just for simplicity we say for now that it was the western Russian steppe, then we know they did not just go to the West: the went south, into Iran, and East into India and even the deserts of western China. They had really scary new weapons at their disposal: the wheel, the horse, the metal plow, cruel social stratification, and the knowledge of how to weave wool into cloth.\n\nYou mentioned the Germanic invasions of the late 2nd century BCE. No ancient author seems to know why exactly the Cimbri \"migrated,\" or from where, and we can these days safely put aside Poseidonius' assertion that they left Jutland because the sea was flooding in. Overpopulation, as you guess, could have been a contributor, but there isn't enough evidence to say for sure. Caesar gives us a relatively thorough account of another such migration, of the Gallic Helvetii in 58 BCE, and even then we do not really get a clear understanding of why exactly they decide to pack up their entire civilization and risk the ire of their neighbors, Roman and Gallic, to seek a new land. Caesar reports that they got sick and tired of being harassed by the Germans to their east.\n\nHarassment was probably the reason for the mass confusion of Eastern Europe at the end of antiquity. As you guess, I think most scholars uneasily accept the Huns to be the bogeyman which sent everything in their path fleeing westwards. Post antique movements into Europe had their own inputs. The point is: there is no one unifying impetus for it all. The viewpoint which makes it seem uncanny springs from a Eurocentric point of view (all these pushy others appearing from the lands beyond rising sun). If we shift the view to, say the Volgue, or the Kyrgistan, we get a very different idea of the same events.", "created_utc": 1556055806, "distinguished": null, "id": "ellvn26", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/bgjgti/why_does_it_seem_like_throughout_ancient_history/ellvn26/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "Here are some others to check out:\n\nMarincola, J. (2011). Greek and Roman historiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.\n\nKraus, C. S., Marincola, J., Pelling, C. B. R., & Woodman, A. J. (2010). Ancient historiography and its contexts: Studies in honour of A.J. Woodman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.\n\nPausch, D. (2010). Stimmen der Geschichte: Funktionen von Reden in der antiken Historiographie. Berlin: De Gruyter.\n\nMarincola, J. (2007). A companion to Greek and Roman historiography. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.\n\nKraus, C. S. (1999). The limits of historiography: Genre and narrative in ancient historical texts. Leiden: Brill.\n\nMarincola, J. (1997). Authority and tradition in ancient historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.", "created_utc": 1547933249, "distinguished": null, "id": "eeh00pn", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ahq0sz/historiography_textbooks_specifically_for_ancient/eeh00pn/", "score": 5 }, { "body": "Van de Mieroop's [*Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History*](https://books.google.com/books?id=c1aFAgAAQBAJ) is essential reading for ancient Near Eastern history. The [other books in the series](https://www.crcpress.com/Approaching-the-Ancient-World/book-series/SE0153) may be of interest as well. ", "created_utc": 1547931949, "distinguished": null, "id": "eegxr6h", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ahq0sz/historiography_textbooks_specifically_for_ancient/eegxr6h/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "For a fairly brief overview from the recovery after the bronze age collapse to Rome I'd recommend this by Charles Freeman which largely does what it says on the tin.\n\nhttps://www.amazon.com/Egypt-Greece-Rome-Civilizations-Mediterranean/dp/0199263647", "created_utc": 1566163839, "distinguished": null, "id": "exd00cn", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/cs6cz8/what_are_the_best_books_covering_ancient_history/exd00cn/", "score": 2 }, { "body": "We used De Oudheid by Naerebout and Singor for Ancient History at university. It might be a good place to start. It's called Antiquity in English.", "created_utc": 1566164243, "distinguished": null, "id": "exd0kkk", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/cs6cz8/what_are_the_best_books_covering_ancient_history/exd0kkk/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "Anyone working on a PhD in ancient history in the US is expected to have a reading knowledge of at least two modern languages, typically French and German, and most departments administer translation exams before you advance to candidacy. \n\nI wrote more about scholarly training in Egyptology in [How difficult is it to become an Egyptologist, and does it require multiple degrees?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dpa5j4/how_difficult_is_it_to_become_an_egyptologist_and/f5tpo4g/) and wrote about the reasons for requiring a reading knowledge of French in [Seeing as Egypt was under British patronage for most of the last two centuries, why is the majority of ancient Egyptian research primarily in French?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bji99u/seeing_as_egypt_was_under_british_patronage_for/em9gq51/)", "created_utc": 1591987813, "distinguished": null, "id": "fumkqjx", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/h17d2x/reception_of_nonenglish_research_in_the/fumkqjx/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "For decades, folklorists followed the lead of the European folk to make a distinction between folktales, elaborate stories told as fiction, and legends, narratives told to be believed. More recently, the celebrated Swedish-Irish folklorist, Bo Almqvist (1931-2013) suggested that the definition of a legend should be that it is a story usually told to be believed, and this points to an issue in folklore studies and to one that you raise.\n\nThe problem is, the folk don't always behave themselves and stick to rigid categories. This is something that folklorists and ethnographers of more recent times have wrestled with when dealing with contemporary cultures and people. A story told in one setting may be taken to be true while in another it is taken to be fictional. Similarly, different members of an audience may regard it in different ways. This is the problem that modern scholars need to address when dealing with more recent expressions of folklore.\n\nGiven that people in a fairly universal way have told stories and made a distinction separating fiction from narratives to be believed, we can assume that the same distinction existed in ancient - and indeed in prehistoric - times. Indeed, ancient literature emerges full of folklore, but it is not always clear if the stories that are recorded in these early texts were of one or the other species. Certainly, we would expect to see expressions of both genres. It is important to point out that this is not a matter of the dichotomy that distinguishes between skeptics and the faithful. Some stories were certainly told purely for entertainment while others were believed to be true. Of those told as true, some were matter of faith while others were simply expressions of people telling about things that they assume to be true - whether they are or are not.\n\nTo determine which texts reflect an actual belief system, we can look to ancient authors, who discuss these stories as matters of belief, even if those authors themselves sometimes give voice to skepticism. After all, if I say that I do not believe in the Resurrection story, there is a built in implication that I had to say that to distinguish myself from those who do believe.\n\nAt the same time, archaeological evidence, especially in the form of temples, demonstrate that we are not looking at a body of fictional stories. There may be some level of misunderstanding the texts and what they imply about belief systems as opposed to a celebration of really good stories, but there is enough evidence to gives us good clues that in much of the material, we are looking at stories that were intended to be believed.", "created_utc": 1564779654, "distinguished": null, "id": "evtvz83", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/cl99rn/how_do_we_know_that_people_in_ancient_history/evtvz83/", "score": 14 }, { "body": "Just to add to what /u/itsallfolklore said about stories in general, one of the main reasons to assume that Greek belief in their gods was genuine is the fact that the gods don't just appear within a discreet set of texts we can label \"myths\". They were everywhere.\n\nWhen we talk about Marvel characters, we are referring to the specific comics and movies in which they play a part. We understand their role purely in terms of what their authors make them say and do in their story lines. They don't step outside these stories and become powers that we believe exist in the real world and affect our daily lives. They remain fictional and live within their own universe. \n\nThis is not true for the Greek gods. While the Greeks told many old stories in which the gods played a part (some of which may have been seen as allegorical, but others as historical truth), they also referred to these same gods as forces affecting the real world. If they were ill, they would pray to Asklepios or Apollo, and if they recovered they would dedicate offerings in thanks. If they hated someone they would call on the gods and demons to punish them, and inscribe their curses on lead tablets. Before a battle or a contest, they didn't just say \"let's fight like Zeus fought the Titans\"; they raised their eyes to the sky and asked Zeus for help (or Hera, or Athena, or Herakles...). If they won, they wouldn't just tell stories of their own courage, but would say this or that divinity personally assisted them. These are not traditional stories or allegories or myths; they make no reference to existing stories about the gods or their roles in legendary events. They are real-world historical or eyewitness accounts which can only be explained if we assume they are told from a perspective in which the gods are real.", "created_utc": 1564786323, "distinguished": null, "id": "evu5pnl", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/cl99rn/how_do_we_know_that_people_in_ancient_history/evu5pnl/", "score": 17 } ]

[ { "body": "Yes, it worked, at least for some things: It's a pretty straightforward treatment for a pretty straightforward injury. A blow to the head can cause bleeding in the dura, the covering for the brain. This bleeding will collect, pressing on the brain, and potentially causing death-- this is a \"subdural hematoma\" or \"epidural hematoma\"\n\nReleasing this pressure by drill in a hole is a simple life saving procedure, and was performed in prehistoric times.\n\nDid it work? There's very good forensic evidence that many people survived these procedures-- we can see skulls which have grown back after trepanning-- eg that proves that the patient lived some considerable time afterwards.\n\nWhat we can't always tell is whether the decision to trepan was the right one. If the patient had, say, migraine headaches or hallucinations-- trepanning would likely have done them no good at all. We've got evidence that trepanning was often performed for reasons that don't seem like they're medically indicated-- so in those cases it wouldn't \"work\" in a contemporary medical sense.\n\n\"Usual outcomes\" asks a quantitative question -- and I haven't seen the data to support a quantitative answer. We know that people did trepanning for both medically reasonable and unreasonable reasons, we know that the procedure was often survived -- though it must have killed people too-- but we can't know the numbers to determine \"usual\" outcomes. We do have references which suggest that in places and times where we have historical records, the procedure was considered \"dangerous -- but sometimes worth the risk.\" You can see precisely this issue being debated by physicians treating Don Carlos (the son of Phillip II and Prince of Asturias) in the 16th century; after many failed attempts, trepanation is performed and he survives.\n\nSee:\n\nLoughborough, John Lovell. “Notes on the Trepanation of Prehistoric Crania.” *American Anthropologist*, vol. 48, no. 3, 1946, pp. 416–422.\n\nVerano, John W., et al. “Holes in the Head: The Art and Archaeology of Trepanation in Ancient Peru.” *Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology*, no. 38, 2016, pp. i-322.\n\nVillalon, Andrew. “The 1562 Head Injury of Don Carlos: A Conflict of Medicine and Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain.” *Mediterranean Studies*, vol. 22, no. 2, 2014, pp. 95–134.", "created_utc": 1579658012, "distinguished": null, "id": "ff7tjlz", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/es2703/in_ancient_history_did_trepanning_work_in_any/ff7tjlz/", "score": 9 } ]

[ { "body": "Hey hoooo, it’s a Big-Thinking Eunuchs Question! I shall refrain from rubbing my hands together in glee and doing a little dance, because you just unwittingly stepped onto Mrs. Caffarelli’s Wild Gender Studies Ride. \n\nEunuchs, as you have very keenly observed on your own, are seemingly the perfect servant. (So much so, [that this is the title of a book about them!](https://books.google.com/books?id=tlvMHa6qKloC&dq=eunuchs+ideal+servant)) Eunuch traditions cross several major global societies and even millennia, and yet, there they are in all these places, still being on a basic level in the same position: servant. Byzantines, Chinese, Assyrians, Ottoman Empire, even, if we take time to argue it, Early Modern Europe. But why? Why does the act of castrating someone magically elevate them from “some dude” to “perfect servant?” \n\nNow be careful, because most people who aren't into anthropology and gender studies and Deep Thinking will give you the same cheap answer - sexual reproduction. You need eunuchs for your big rich harems and controlling the means of reproduction. You, however, don’t appear to have fallen into this trap, because you bring up their political service only! :) \n\nSo what is a eunuch really? In these societies, eunuchs were a highly specific class of people: you can frame them in whatever way you'd like, as their own race of people, as their own gender of people, however you'd like to think of them, just know that in these societies they are an [Other](https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Other) of some sort. And eunuchs are an Other so very other that he is outside of a binary gender paradigm, with his otherness inscribed on his flesh through the act of castration. It’s much easier to subjugate an Other than it is anyone else. So the “perfect servant,” is, well, someone slightly outside of humanity, who isn’t a full member of your society, who can’t have a full life for one reason or another. Which is eunuchs to a T. Even when they appear in positions of extreme power it is still as a servant, to the king, or perhaps to God, more metaphorically. Some of the most powerful eunuchs in history were still very much servants, Beshir Agha was the servant of the Sultan, Narses was the servant of the Emperor. \n\nBut we should also not forget about the eunuch as a tangible symbol of permanent [liminality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality#Of_beings). Liminal means threshold, or in-between, which is made manifest in the eunuch’s gender. A permanently liminal person has many uses in a society with high levels of segregation of some sort (man-woman, man-god, man-royalty, etc.) So your liminal gendered being, where does he go, what does he do? He goes to the gates, the locked doors, the sacred spaces, the forbidden and secret, he goes wherever you need a go-between. The different societies with eunuch traditions, the eunuch is a creature of the court, an elite servant, a politician, a religious servant of God, a teacher of children, a link between sequestered women and the outside world, or perhaps just a house-slave that mans the front door. His roles gravitate towards other very liminal venues in society, be they keeping gender segregation intact, protecting children from adults, keeping the common people away from the emperor and royalty, keeping mortals a respectful distance from God, or just keeping unwelcome people out of your vestibule (“vestibules” are not as exciting as “harems”, yet somehow it is the most obvious liminal space eunuchs popped up in!)\n\nI plagiarized an old answer of mine for this because I’ve developed a remarkable backlog of old answers in this Google Drive, and I’m working on a grant application this afternoon… so please let me know if anything’s unclear or I can expand on something for you. :) ", "created_utc": 1453323911, "distinguished": null, "id": "cz5nwgy", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/41w3ff/why_were_eunuchs_so_prevalent_as_both_servants_to/cz5nwgy/", "score": 93 }, { "body": "The answer to your second question, at least in the time-frame you gave in your opening post, is that it was believed eunuchs were considered more stable in high-ranking positions because they could not have children. Therefore, there'd be no motivation for them to rebel and attempt to start a dynasty of their own. This did not preclude eunuchs from gathering political and financial power and wealth for their own means, of course.\n\nThe answer to your first question can then be derived from this. Voluntary castration was a method some people used in order to be considered for high-ranking positions in the civil service. It also served as a traditional punishment for crimes in China during the period. Many crimes carried a punishment of some sort of physical mutilation, from tattooing to castration, in order to \"mark\" an offender for life.", "created_utc": 1453321215, "distinguished": null, "id": "cz5luen", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/41w3ff/why_were_eunuchs_so_prevalent_as_both_servants_to/cz5luen/", "score": 10 } ]

[ { "body": "Hi, it seems that, generally speaking, soldiers were released during the winter, and armies reformed in spring for \"Campaign Season\". While you're waiting for a direct answer here, I took a spin for posts on the subject. Here are couple describing exceptions:\n\n* /u/ScottHammond on Alexander in [In the pre-modern era, did armies really stop fighting in the winter?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1path0/in_the_premodern_era_did_armies_really_stop/cd1erfr/)\n\n* /u/AmesCG on Caesar in [What stopped an scheming general from taking advantage of the 'Campaign season'?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ig0za/what_stopped_an_scheming_general_from_taking/)\n\ncontinued...", "created_utc": 1544778747, "distinguished": null, "id": "ebrasix", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/a634ye/how_was_winter_warfare_generally_conducted_during/ebrasix/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "u/alricofgar weighed in on this topic [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lyrz4/why_does_the_difference_between_bronzeironsteel/) - some other commenters, such as yours truly, provided minor contributions as well.", "created_utc": 1475758627, "distinguished": null, "id": "d8gczka", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5641mk/so_ive_been_reading_a_few_books_about_ancient/d8gczka/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "Secessio Plebis (withdrawal of the Plebs) was a form of protest that occurred several times during the Roman Republic, it entailed large portions of the Plebeian class (commoners) leaving the city and the Patricians (ruling families) to fend for themselves. \n\nSince the plebeians were the shopkeepers and workshop owners, their secession meant near enough all trade and commerce within the city stopped dead in its tracks, food stopped being produced and labour and construction came to a halt. \n\nAs for how they were received, the ruling families of Rome understood that a city could not function without a majority of its population and although there may have been some resentment towards the plebeians, there was usually a compromise given up by the ruling families through the powers of the senate: for example the first recorded secession in 449BC led to the creation of the tribune of the Plebs, the first government position in the republic to be held by the Plebs. \n\n\nif you would like to read more about such a subject, I would suggest:\n\n•Cornell, T.J., \"The Beginnings of Rome\", Routledge, (1995) \n\nAnd \n\n•The Growth of Plebeian Privilege in Rome', The English Historical Review No. II (April 1886)\n", "created_utc": 1544013981, "distinguished": null, "id": "eb4vdpa", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/a38fn6/does_ancient_history_hold_any_records_of_massive/eb4vdpa/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "I can ramble about this for a bit.\n\nPlato wrote a short dialogue called Ion, and music is the theme. The conclusion, as I remember it, is that music is not a skill, but is in fact a result of possession by the muse and is a divine gift. Thus, in a chain resembling (as Plato says) the attraction between magnets, the Muse inspired Homer who inspired the Rhapsodes: these were more or less the \"Rock Stars\" of the Greek world Our titular Ion is one such a Rhapsode. He has just come from the state of Ephesus, where the games of Asclepius have just taken place, and where he won the first prize. The Olympics are the most famous of the Greek games, but there were a lot of these festivals, and in addition to the 'sports', they had music contests. Depending on the contests, the physical prize was only a crown of laurels or some such vegetable matter, or actual wealth at others, but the fame and glory that came along with such a victory was **HUGE**. Winners themselves were celebrated in song: we have, for instance, [an ode for Midas of Akragas,](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pindar_and_Anacreon/Pindar/Pythian_Odes/12) who won the flute contest at the Pythian games in either 494 or 490 BCE. Unlike the cast majority of Greek literature, these odes by the Theban poet Pindar were important enough to survive to the modern period. Some hundred years after Pindar's death, when Alexander the Great razed Thebes to the ground, he is said to have left one building standing: Pindar's house. This stuff was important. \n\nMany years later, in the first century AD, the Roman emperor Nero would decide he wanted to be a musician and toured Greece to do so, where these sorts of musical contests were apparently still going on. This sort of thing was very scandalous to traditional Roman sensibilities. At least among the aristocratic class, the idea of performing on a stage was not held in high esteem. ", "created_utc": 1544735024, "distinguished": null, "id": "ebq1r3w", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/a5vq1s/were_musicians_held_in_high_regard_in_ancient/ebq1r3w/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "I think the most salient way that they have been colored by biases is by access. Many near eastern ancient historical artifacts were discovered during the late 19th and early 20th century, which corresponded with the zenith of power for several European empires. This of course meant that lots of it ended up getting shipped back to Europe or America, rather than staying in the countries they were found in (see the British Museum, the Louvre, various archaeology museums at western Universities). This means that instead of being connected to the deeper history of a place, far ancient history was often treated as entirely disconnected from its place of origin. Only now is some of this being rectified, with several high profile repatriations of artifacts. Still, as the recent bombing of the archaeological museum in Cairo shows, there is (somewhat justified) hesitancy towards relinquishing some of these artifacts. ", "created_utc": 1393373047, "distinguished": null, "id": "cfoqhda", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ywjgr/to_what_extent_is_our_understanding_of_very/cfoqhda/", "score": 6 } ]

[ { "body": "It's mentioned alarmingly often in historical texts because it was and always has been really extraordinary. Diplomats have served rulers and nations for millennia, and they frequently have been members of a ruling family or some other person with close ties to the leader. This is, incidentally, why it's not really a bad thing for anyone involved when a US President appoints a close friend or a big campaign donor to an ambassadorship. It means he's a guy with a direct line to the leader. Professional civil servants handle the hard work anyway.\n\nBut I digress. Envoys and diplomats have frequently been, if not powerful themselves, then power-proximate and usually stood to benefit personally in a variety of ways if they succeeded in whatever their diplomatic objectives were. Okay, once in a few generations some ornery Greeks threw a few Medes down a well, or a Khan thought a guy was being a little rude, but really diplomacy is one of the most important functions of any ruling body, and for thousands of years rulers have known it's a bad idea for it to break down.\n\nYou have to remember that the role of an envoy was for much of history a very very powerful one. They had to be empowered to negotiate on their ruler's behalf, to strike deals, offer concessions, and even to make credible threats. There was a Roman consul during the late Republic named Popilius Laenas who managed to prevent a war between the Seleucid Empire and Egypt by showing up at the war camp of King Antiochus's invading army, where he handed him a decree passed by the Roman Senate that essentially ordered him to stop being a dick. When Antiochus said he would consult his advisors, the Consul drew a circle around him in the sand and demanded that Antiochus reply to the Senate decree before exiting the circle. Antiochus was so intimidated by the power of Rome that was being represented in this one individual that he stood down his army and went home with his tail between his legs.\n\nDiplomats represent the power of the nation they serve. As such, for most of history, they and their safety has been of great import to their home country and to the country they have been sent to negotiate with. The concept of diplomatic immunity is used today mostly as a plot device in bad procedural crime shows, but its history is ancient. You don't kill or imprison diplomats. Violating such a long-standing accord is like refusing safe harbor to ships in distress. It's happened plenty of times, but it's worth commenting on.", "created_utc": 1448373055, "distinguished": null, "id": "cxbcp2r", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3u2e8j/when_reading_about_history_especially_ancient/cxbcp2r/", "score": 35 } ]

[ { "body": ">the African presence in the Americas that predated the European\n\nThere is no evidence for this. You can read more about it and related theories in our [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/nativeamerican), though please do follow up with more specific questions you might have.", "created_utc": 1445904669, "distinguished": null, "id": "cwe0bsx", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qcow0/what_is_some_of_the_best_evidence_that/cwe0bsx/", "score": 16 }, { "body": "I don't at all consider myself to be a \"Afrocentric\", I do know Egyptian history very well. One of the problems and disconnects with Afrocentrism is proving someone is \"black\" or of \"African\" ancestry is weird because we're all kinda African but no one is black.\n\n\nRace is fake. You should recognize the difference between phenotype and genotype, one is traceable through DNA the other is represented by features we see. Race is a creation of phenotype.\n\nSo immediately we're putting our conditioned understanding of peoples of different colors into a system that's only existed within the last 300yrs the [way we know it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism).\n\nIf you want concrete reasoning you should read Martin Bernal's *Black Athena* which you state. I don't believe Ancient Egyptians were \"black\" that's made up nonsense but they were African, Egypt is on the continent of Africa. They've alluded to where their [origins reside](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3APrehistoric_Egypt), this also correlates with a few things:\n\n* Many of their gods were the [same](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandulis)\n* The oldest mummy discovered using mummification comes from the Sahara when it was once green. It's called the [Black Mummy of the Green Sahara](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz94ZjGCy2s) this along with many other factors lead Anthropologist to believe many of the settlers of the Nile were from the Sahara and flocked there once the dessert started becoming what it is today.\n* [Napta Playa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabta_Playa) - **possibly the best thing no one talks about** it's in the interior of Africa and most certainly is the birthplace for Ancient Egyptian cosmology. \n\nWe know the Ancient Egyptians differed from the present Egyptians. Modern Egyptians don't practice the same religions as the ancients or know of the ancient's philosophies or decipher hieroglyphics for that matter? It's because Egypt went through centuries of foreign conquest after it had been established for 3K years (Assyrians, Persians, Greeks then Rome). Then something happened around 639CE that migrated Arabs into the area and later, Turkey and the Ottoman empire which brings us to now.\n\n**Now to Afrocentrism**\n\nBlack people aren't entirely crazy for thinking Egyptians were \"black\" in the way we use the word today on phenotype alone:\n\n* This is [Queen Tiye](https://www.google.com/search?q=Queen+Tiye&es_sm=93&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAmoVChMIsdXch4_iyAIVx2QmCh2qkwOC&biw=1554&bih=877)\n* She was the mother of [Akhnaten](https://www.google.com/search?q=akhnaten&es_sm=93&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAmoVChMI3_Dhl5XiyAIVQi8mCh2hwQjG&biw=1544&bih=895) \n* Who was the father of [Tutankhamun](https://www.google.com/search?q=king+tut&es_sm=93&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAWoVChMIt42fypXiyAIVQkMmCh18wwCQ&biw=1544&bih=895). \n\nIn the Louvre Museum in Paris there's paintings of [Amenhotep III](https://www.google.com/search?q=louvre+amenhotep+iii&es_sm=93&biw=1544&bih=877&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAWoVChMI_5is7pDiyAIVhekmCh0dYwWa) taken from his tomb. Many peoples have seen these themselves and would conclude that if that guy was alive in 1960's Alabama he'd have to sit at the back of the bus.\n\nSo it gets tricky. They look blackish... or something to the sort. Are we using the one drop rule? Or just skin tone? Are we using femur and skull sizes well then in that case you have this from [Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_Fran%C3%A7ois_de_Chasseb%C5%93uf,_comte_de_Volney).\n\nBlack people have reason to be reluctant to the classifications of scholars, historically speaking there's been a pervasive inclination of academia to deny African achievement. Case and point would be the discovery of Great Zimbabwe, when archeologist found the ruins [Cecil Rhodes & crew immediately thought they couldn't have been of African origins. They came up with crazy theories to explain how it got there](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Zimbabwe).", "created_utc": 1445931226, "distinguished": null, "id": "cwed97q", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qcow0/what_is_some_of_the_best_evidence_that/cwed97q/", "score": 0 } ]

[ { "body": "I'm sure there are people here who will disagree with me, and that's fine. \n\nYou are right to identify the paucity of sources. The effect of that is everyone working in these fields has basically read everything, so we all know what each other is talking about (if we're good at our jobs, which of course isn't a given). The issue then comes down to interpretation - how do you understand a particular source, how do you use it in conjunction with other sources, etc. Of course for that you cite the scholar you're quibbling with. There are better and worse ways to do this. Personally I like making arguments from the primary sources rather than evaluating other scholars' works, but both approaches are necessary.\n\nWhether other periods rely equally on historiography, I don't know. I don't study them.", "created_utc": 1415826631, "distinguished": null, "id": "cm0qb8s", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2m3myj/is_the_study_of_ancient_history_more_dominated_by/cm0qb8s/", "score": 4 }, { "body": "As someone trained in ancient history, but who has taken courses with many historians of other periods, I will argue that any academic historian who is important in their field and is advancing new ideas will __*have to*__ engage with historiographical trends and scholarship--not just ancient historians. Yes, scholars of Herodotus and Plutarch and Livy will interpret the primary sources differently, and yes, if you want to interpret Livy I.14.6-8 in a novel way, you are going to have to engage with any previous scholar who has written about that passage. For a text thousands of years old, there may be a lot of people who have discussed that passage of Livy.\n\nBut, for scholars of medieval manuscripts, or of feudal Japan, or of Ottoman Egypt, or of any other period in any part of the world with written primary sources, modern historians are going to interpret the primary sources differently. Even historians of the 20th century disagree with some aspects of the primary sources from the World Wars, or with the US Civil Rights Movement, or the Space Race. Historians have to distill a wide variety of sources to construct a narrative history for their audience, and every historian is going to do so in a manner differently from every other historian. For serious scholars, these differences are debated through academic publications.\n\nWhat I think your questions is really asking about, OP, is pedagogy. How is history being taught in college classrooms? In my experience, every 100-200 level history course will not cite sources very liberally. Textbooks will give a narrative of events that is generally accepted among most historians.\n\nIn upper-division course, however, and not just in ancient history courses, professors will generally begin assigning different point of views from different scholars. Historians on the whole have disagreed about **everything** in the field; that is just the nature of the field. For students and scholars serious about learning and producing history, there is no such thing as a single, agreed-upon set of facts to give to a class. I argue that this is not unique to ancient history, but to all history.\n", "created_utc": 1415835110, "distinguished": null, "id": "cm0uwzv", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2m3myj/is_the_study_of_ancient_history_more_dominated_by/cm0uwzv/", "score": 4 } ]

[ { "body": "I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that virtually every aspect of archaeology has been overwritten in the century plus since 1900. Technical improvements in optics, chemical analysis, and computing have certainly contributed substantially to our ability to analyze archaeological data, but the greatest improvements have come from the intellectual development of the field rather than the technical. \n\nYes things like carbon dating and genetics exist now, but it's worth considering that the majority of archaeological research still uses tools that would have been just as capable a century ago. What's changed is the intellectual context all these tools and techniques exist in. We're still using excavation data from the 19th and 20th centuries at Chaco canyon and yet almost all of the interesting results concerning the canyon were published after 1980. \n\nJust to list some of the developments that have appeared since 1900:\n\n* Past societies had economies\n\n* Genetics is not the same as culture. Past archeologists used to claim migration for every instance of observable cultural change. The reality is that sometimes people changed without being invaded by barbarians.\n\n* Archeology is no longer (directly) an element of state sponsored colonialism. I still criticize anthropologists / archeologists for not being cognizant of the political ramifications of their research, but the field has dramatically improved.\n\n* Resistance and agency are actually important now. This has had huge implications in non European archeology.\n\n* Archeologists are beginning to treat the subject of change. This is one of the big future challenges, but past archeologists simply had no conception that it was even a problem.\n\n* We've gotten somewhat away from the major Western assumptions, like teleology and gender when historical people. Despite the public unpopularity of some of these ideas, they've been incredibly useful.\n\nEntire books have been written on this subject, but hopefully that gives you some overview of how archeology has developed. The technical innovations have been cool, but these intellectual ideas have had so much more impact on our ability to interpret even the data we already had.\n\n", "created_utc": 1481424815, "distinguished": null, "id": "db1lgwf", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5hn3x6/how_much_has_our_understanding_of_ancient_history/db1lgwf/", "score": 14 } ]

[ { "body": "This is not a problem most of us worry a great deal about, and honestly the answer is nowhere near as exciting as you might think it is. For a start, there is a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5izv93/how_confident_are_we_that_the_year_is_actually/dbc9y1r/) in the AskHistorians FAQ by u/sunagainstgold that details how the modern BC/AD dating system was created, and how it has been matched up with other dating systems.\n\n​\n\nIn terms of dating events in Roman history, the Romans themselves kept relatively good records. Every year was known by the names of the consuls who served, and those records were displayed in public. The [*fasti capitolini*](http://www.attalus.org/translate/fasti2.html) is the best preserved list of consuls, listing the names of magistrates from the fifth century BC up to the year before the death of Augustus in 14 AD. We are also helped by the 'annalistic' tradition of historical writing that was popular in Rome, which was organised on a year-by-year basis. These various texts aren't perfect, and even the Romans themselves had problems with dating their own history. The biggest issue is the fact that four pairs of consuls seem to be missing from some time in the fourth century BC. Various solutions were proposed in Antiquity, but none are totally satisfactory - you can read about the whole thing [here](http://www.livius.org/articles/concept/varronian-chronology/) if you like, although I must admit that it makes my head hurt just thinking about it.\n\nAnyway, Tacitus's *Annals* was influenced by the annalist tradition I mentioned above (although the work is not strictly 'annalist' because he doesn't simply record the events that happen in each year, but gives his interpretation and opinion), and it's in this work that the Great Fire of AD 64 is recorded. Tacitus says that the fire happened:\n\n> *C. Laecanio M. Licinio consulibus* \n> \n> In the consulate of Gaius Laecanius and Marcus Licinius\n\nWe know Tacitus wasn't totally making this up because there's an [inscription](http://db.edcs.eu/epigr/epi_ergebnis.php) attesting their consulship. That's not to say there are no problems with other dates given in Tacitus, and there are scholarly arguments about dating various historical events, from an earthquake in Campania (either AD 62 or 63, or both) to Domitian's war against the Chatti (82-83 or 83-85?). Problems usually arise when we have multiple accounts of the same event from different authors, but who give slightly different evidence for the dating. As I alluded to at the beginning, the way these dispute are settled are excruciatingly boring, and very rarely make the headlines.", "created_utc": 1539182257, "distinguished": null, "id": "e7ijkr1", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/9mybll/how_do_we_know_the_dates_of_events_in_ancient/e7ijkr1/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "To add a little bit of meat to this answer, I talk about hairstyles and makeup styles of Tang dynasty women (what you'd be seeing in that show, seeing as it's Wu Zetian) [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jebjb/what_are_the_significance_of_painted_eyebrows/) if you're interested.\n\n\nAs for your specific question, mostly we're talking hairpins, combs, and a good mirror. Or, if you're [Yang Guifei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Guifei), a good wig collection. Combs would be gold, silver, ivory, bone, etc. and were fairly small with a curve to them. The hairpins...well. There were a lot of hairpins needed. As I state in that answer I linked, towards the end of the Tang, often the hairpins would be made of lapis lazuli (which signified a loss of one's home). \n\nAs for the mirrors, these aren't mirrors made of glass. Instead, they're polished bronze mirrors, often with some kind of representation of a constellation or mythical animal on the backside. Often, they'd have a stand and were decently tall, or would be affixed to a cosmetic chest. Sidenote that may be interesting: Emperor Zhongzong commissioned a mirror of about 10 square feet, with a bronze \"tree\" as the frame, adorned with gold blossoms and silver leaves (apparently so that when he mounted his horse he could stare at the whole picture in the reflection).\n\n", "created_utc": 1435637044, "distinguished": null, "id": "csn78jz", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bl5fz/how_did_royal_chinese_women_in_ancient_history/csn78jz/", "score": 10 } ]

[ { "body": "I am not exactly sure what you mean. The field of history itself doesn't begin until the fifth century BCE with Herodotus and Thucydides. Both had unique styles and manners to convey the past or the current, in many cases. Historians like Xenophon broke ground in areas like anecdotal and biographical history. These Greek historians would be mimicked and studied by historians we would consider to be 'ancient.' One notable historian such as this was Procopius (6th Century CE), who wrote in a very similar manner to Herodotus. He used pre-battle speeches and deliberate omissions just as Herodotus did. It is important to keep in mind that these historians wrote about their contemporaries and events taking place during their lifetime. \n\nI am not sure if this is what you were looking for and I am sure someone here can give you the answer you seek. My apologies if it wasn't helpful.", "created_utc": 1533055711, "distinguished": null, "id": "e3cye8q", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/939ijp/did_any_ancient_societies_study_ancient_history/e3cye8q/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "This is great and I think I can recommend some great supplementary objects, but could you specify when exactly your cut-off is as far as timeline? Also, you are covering the whole world's histories I assume? ", "created_utc": 1470964807, "distinguished": null, "id": "d6dy5he", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/4x7uj3/teaching_ancient_history/d6dy5he/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "You'd probably want to run over to ask [anthropologists](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/).\n\n\nMore broadly, prior to the understanding of radiometric dating techniques things were typically aged within the confines of what we knew. If you have one arrow head manufactured with a very specific technique and a very specific design, and you find another one, you know that the two are most likely related. If you're excavating a site one painful millimeter at a time, and you find artifacts at one elevation, and then even more at a much deeper elevation, *odds are* that the deeper one is older. \n\n\nAnd to be fair, even radiometric dating can give you a *lot* of wiggle room. Sometimes you really are dealing with something that's millions of years old and radiometric dating can give you an idea of it's age, give or take ten thousand years. Or in the case of Radium Strontium dating, it can tell you if something is billions of years old, give or take a few million years. Or something is *old* but not the right kind of old, because it either doesn't have the right isotopes to measure- potassium argon dating, carbon dating, etc- to be measured properly. \n\n\nArchaeology is one of the more scientific disciplines under the umbrella of anthropology, but a good half the discipline is still methods and interpretation, which can very much be more of an art. Dating was fairly reliable, but only if you stayed within the confines of recorded history. You could reliably draw a line from, say, Socrates to the modern period because we knew he was alive, we knew when he died, we knew who his students were, and we know that at the end of this line of thought Alexander the Great goes on a tour of the Middle East and makes some Babylonians cry and eventually the Romans show up and decide that Greece looks like a cozy place ton conquer. On the other end of the spectrum we have lost works of people like Plato (Hermocrates), or Archimedes (On Sphere-Making) or Homer (Margites) or even some of Shakespear's work (Cardenio) which we often only know about because someone else references them in their writing. \n\n\nDating an object- or a person, or a place- without the perks of radiometric dating is often done much like navigating on a map. If you can plot it on a 'map' relative to an important date that is well established, you can establish, roughly, the age of something else. ", "created_utc": 1508087907, "distinguished": null, "id": "doekgu7", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/76jiqz/before_radiocarbon_dating_how_inaccurate_were/doekgu7/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "Adapted my answer to a similar question asked a while ago:\n\nMost ancient peoples had a fairly detailed story of their own origins and prehistory, which tended to begin with the gods or with an age of super-human rulers. Ancient ruins that were poorly understood could be given a place in such stories. For example, the Greeks thought the great palaces at Mycenae and Tiryns had been built by giants in the heroic age.\n\nSome devoted real attention to traces of their predecessors. Even in the age of Rameses II, there were already people in Egypt whose job was to study the nature and purpose of the Pyramids. Their civilization was so old that its early achievements had become a mystery to them, and they hoped to placate the gods and find ancient wisdom by restoring ancient statues and buildings.\n\nAlternatively, they might just encounter ancient ruins in passing. There's a scene from Xenophon's Anabasis in which Greek mercenaries encounter an ancient, abandoned city in the heart of the Persian Empire. This was probably Nineveh, the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Xenophon marvels at the size and circumference of the walls, and notes that some locals have taken refuge from the invading army on the flat top of a pyramid (clearly a crumbling ziggurat).\n", "created_utc": 1451771402, "distinguished": null, "id": "cyjoj3t", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3z4vav/how_did_ancients_view_their_own_ancient_history/cyjoj3t/", "score": 10 } ]

[ { "body": "It varies a lot from volume to volume and chapter to chapter, since they're all written by different people. I personally don't find the CAH terribly useful. The bits of it that matter to me tend to be not so much expository (\"here's a bunch of stuff that happened, here's the evidence for it, here are the problems\") as argumentative (\"here are the issues that historians contemporary with me are concerned with, and here's my view, and no I'm not going to cite any evidence except occasionally when I feel like it\").\n\nBut a still bigger problem is that it's all battles and kings, especially in the older volumes. The only elements of cultural history that get discussed are to do with aristocrats and other elites: so there's a decent amount about things like political factions and economy, but if you're looking for chapters on demography, poverty, slavery, or women, look somewhere else because there's *nothing there*.\n\nI find it difficult to recommend unless you're *solely* into political or military history.", "created_utc": 1350416307, "distinguished": null, "id": "c6netiv", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/11kn4m/is_the_cambridge_ancient_history_series_worth/c6netiv/", "score": 5 }, { "body": "The last update was in 2010 or so. I haven't read it all but I certainly dip into parts of it when I need to gain the narrative historical context for certain events or processes - I don't think it's let me down yet.", "created_utc": 1350404630, "distinguished": null, "id": "c6nbch5", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/11kn4m/is_the_cambridge_ancient_history_series_worth/c6nbch5/", "score": 3 }, { "body": "I was about to start [Will Durant's The Story of Civilization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization), and I would appreciate an answer to the same question. ", "created_utc": 1350415478, "distinguished": null, "id": "c6neknn", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/11kn4m/is_the_cambridge_ancient_history_series_worth/c6neknn/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "Here is an interesting thread from a couple years ago along the lines of this topic, but it doesn't address your war question. I personally haven't heard of an account of any people going to war to promote atheism.\n\nhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2tu3qd/was_atheism_a_recognised_way_of_thinking_in_the/\n", "created_utc": 1510848169, "distinguished": null, "id": "dpwuptk", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/7dau2q/how_common_was_atheism_in_ancient_history/dpwuptk/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "I believe these answers address your question: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/science#wiki\\_imagining\\_the\\_future\\_and\\_futurism](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/science#wiki_imagining_the_future_and_futurism)", "created_utc": 1545393334, "distinguished": null, "id": "ec8ug8f", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/a87ze6/is_there_an_ancient_history_version_of_science/ec8ug8f/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "Well we do have some possible specimens of Ashurbanipal's handwriting. We have several tablets signed by him and they are notable in that they are clearly not written by a professional scribe. So they may actually be by him.\n", "created_utc": 1418938269, "distinguished": null, "id": "cmyyd4u", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pp7oh/do_signatures_of_writersfigures_from_antiquity/cmyyd4u/", "score": 11 } ]

[ { "body": "In which part of the world? The history of metallurgy is going to be drastically different in the Mediterranean than in China, West Africa, South America, or Mesoamerica.", "created_utc": 1461010870, "distinguished": null, "id": "d27yqxy", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/4fdpha/what_is_the_ancient_history_of_metallurgy/d27yqxy/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "The Asiatic Vespers was the cleansing of Romans from Anatolia.\n\nWhen Rome was Achieving Victory after Victory, many despised the Romans for their growing influence, one famous one was a Mithradates of Pergamon, King of Pontus. During the early days of Mithradates of Pergamon: \"Mithridates orchestrated a massacre of Roman and Italian settlers remaining in several Anatolian cities, essentially wiping out the Roman presence in the region. This episode is known as the Asiatic Vespers\" He made alliances with the rulers all around him as he planned an all out war with the Roman Republic, they sent General Sulla to retaliate with a massive invasion force and he essentially took back greece from Pontus but he was criticised for his brutality, especially to Athens, which he practically destroyed. So that was an attempted Genocide of Romans. Sulla was fighting with Gaius Marius and Gaius Marius wanted to sign a peace treaty with Pontus to piss of Sulla and effectively leaving his army there so the Pontic forces could rally and destroy Sulla and yadda yadda yadda, it was all about Politics back in Rome. Mithridates was then defeated entirely by Pompey and that was that, what happens when you massacre thousands of innocent Roman Citizens in cold blood.\n\n**TL:DR:** The Asiatic Vespers lead to the Mithridatic Wars. Also a failed Genocide attempt (I may be stretching though)", "created_utc": 1398361902, "distinguished": null, "id": "ch0zfz6", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/23szxp/we_see_all_these_genocides_in_the_20th_century/ch0zfz6/", "score": 4 } ]

[ { "body": "Aristophanes was an Athenian playwright renowned for his wit and satire which holds up even today, best known for The Clouds, a play satirising Socrates. I had to read it for a class a few semesters ago and burst out laughing several times. He also wrote Lysistrata, another comedy. I haven't read anymore of his works, but he is known as a comic playwright. \n\nI can't tell you for sure, but this [wiki page](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Dionysia) makes me think that plays were the equivalent to stand up back then. ", "created_utc": 1369275120, "distinguished": null, "id": "ca46rc7", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ev6zo/who_were_the_great_comic_minds_of_ancient_history/ca46rc7/", "score": 11 }, { "body": "By \"comic mind\" you seem to imply \"author of comedy,\" which isn't exactly the same as a stand up. The stereotype says that while Greeks preferred intellectual comedy, Romans went for slapstick, and to some extent that's true, unless one considers poets. Ovid, Catullus, Propertius all have their comic moments (especially Ovid). But if you want brilliant two line comedy, with a set up and a punch line, look into Martial, the godfather of all stand up comedians.", "created_utc": 1369286034, "distinguished": null, "id": "ca4adll", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ev6zo/who_were_the_great_comic_minds_of_ancient_history/ca4adll/", "score": 7 }, { "body": "The thing about most jokes is that they aren't funny once you have to explain them. Due to both the language barrier and the widely different cultural context, most ancient jokes need to be explained.\n\n**Marcus Tullius Cicero** was known by his contemporaries for his wit. This book: \n\nhttp://books.google.nl/books?id=RklBjIk8cHUC&pg=PA81 \n\n...even states that Caesar collected and published Cicero's jokes (although another source I found says this was done by Cicero's slave Tiro). And here is an article about famed classicist Mary Beard speaking about Roman humour (and claiming Cicero to be the funniest Roman): \n\nhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2009/apr/03/classics\n\nAlthough it suffers from the language barrier, I think this is one of Cicero's better puns:\n\n>Above all others, [Caesar] loved Servilia, who was the mother of Marcus Brutus, and in his first consulship he bought for her a pearl costing six million sesterces. During the civil war, he acquired some fine estates for her in a public auction at a nominal price and when some expressed their surprise at the low figure, Cicero quipped: “It’s a better bargain than you think, for he got a third off” *[also meaning that \"he seduced Tertia\"]*. And in fact it was thought that Servilia was pimping her own daughter Tertia to Caesar.\n\nThis is found in Book I of Suetonius' biography of Caesar.\n\n*Almost insta-edit!* Found some more good ones here: http://p4b.blogspot.nl/2010/04/sword-of-cicero.html", "created_utc": 1369292143, "distinguished": null, "id": "ca4bqqu", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ev6zo/who_were_the_great_comic_minds_of_ancient_history/ca4bqqu/", "score": 4 } ]

[ { "body": "More can be written, but there's one answer from the Science section of the FAQ: [\"What did people think about static electricity shocks before electricity was discovered?\"](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7rvynq/what_did_people_think_about_static_electricity/dt03t9g/) by /u/hillsonghoods .\n\nThis is not to discourage discussion. Further questions, data, and debate are always welcome.\n", "created_utc": 1529686517, "distinguished": null, "id": "e148vua", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/8t1hlh/how_did_people_throughout_ancient_history_explain/e148vua/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "The chances of finding a more-or-less-intact copy of a \"new\" Greco-Roman work of history are very slim, I'm afraid. The last such text to be discovered was the [Hellenika Oxyrhynchia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenica_Oxyrhynchia), found in the first half of the 20th century, and that's still only fragments.\n\nIt is *in principle* possible that an intact mediaeval copy of some lost work is sitting in a shelf somewhere, maybe at Mt Athos or some monastery in Ukraine, but even if so, we've certainly got very nearly the entirety of what survives. Papyri are more promising, because there are always chances of finding a long-lost stockpile buried somewhere (however remote that chance may be); the flip side of that is that papyri are always in very, very poor condition, mostly scraps with just a few letters. Even so, when you have hundreds or thousands of such scraps it's often possible to make something of them. The Hellenika Oxyrhynchia mostly consists of two large-ish fragments.\n\nBut you're neglecting material evidence; and I wouldn't understate the importance of new analysis of old evidence either. For many aspects of the study of the Greco-Roman world, archaeology is far, far more important than historiography. It would be much harder to study things like ancient diets, demography, causes of death, and individual religious cults, without archaeology; and it would be basically impossible to study rural areas, trade routes and trade goods, and the lives of non-aristocrats. On the side of new historiographical analysis, there are many thousands of lost authors and texts that can be studied through the collation and careful analysis of fragments preserved in surviving texts. Just last year an important new edition came out of lost Roman historians (T. J. Cornell, ed., *Fragments of the Roman Historians*, 3 vols., Oxford, 2013). And it's always going to be possible to bring new types of analysis to bear, like the adoption since the 1980s of actuarial analysis to study ancient demography (relying on both historiographical and archaeological evidence). It's not as though there's a shortage of avenues of study to uncover new information!", "created_utc": 1405110789, "distinguished": null, "id": "ciutzed", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2aga84/what_are_the_chances_of_getting_new_information/ciutzed/", "score": 8 }, { "body": "You seem to be more concerned with textual sources, of which there is always a small chance that something will turn up. But don't forget material culture! Excavations are always turning up new objects that provide fascinating windows into what life was like in the ancient world. \n\nAnd even if nothing new is \"found\" or \"discovered,\" there is always more to discover about the texts and objects we do have. For example, the Antikythera Mechanism was found in 1900 and largely disregarded until it was discovered to be an incredibly complex analog computer in 2006. Studies of the device continue today. \n\nThis isn't from the ancient world, but another example that comes to mind is the Voynich Manuscript, which dates from the 15th century and is in a language that not even professional codebreakers are able to decipher. It appears to depict species of plants that are currently unknown or lost.\n\nThere is always a chance of something new being \"dug up\" out of the ground or found tucked away in some library somewhere. But the transfer of knowledge is often more complex than that, and despite the caveat at the beginning of your post, I would argue that \"better or more accurate interpretations of ancient history\" would prove much more fascinating and can spur academic debate for years to come, with or without the kinds of dramatic discoveries glorified by Indiana Jones and more popular history. ", "created_utc": 1405116581, "distinguished": null, "id": "ciux00p", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2aga84/what_are_the_chances_of_getting_new_information/ciux00p/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "Ancient history is a pretty broad timespan. You might want to narrow that down a bit.", "created_utc": 1439571082, "distinguished": null, "id": "cu2xymh", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gz14u/who_was_the_wealthiest_individual_in_ancient/cu2xymh/", "score": 4 } ]

[ { "body": "It depends on what part of ancient history you're interested in. If you're looking for an overview of Ancient Greek history that shows you the primary material, I'd recommend Robin Osborne's *Greece in the Making, 1200-479 BC* (2nd ed. 2009), followed by Simon Hornblower's *The Greek World, 479-323 BC* (3rd ed. 2002). Unfortunately there isn't really a detailed textbook that covers both periods. If you're looking for a history of the Near East and Mesopotamia, the main textbook is Amélie Kuhrt's *The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC* (1995).\n\nBlackwell's *Companion* series has great volumes on just about every period of Ancient History (although the one on Persia isn't out yet); I'd particularly recommend the *Companion to Archaic Greece* (2009).", "created_utc": 1480273479, "distinguished": null, "id": "dahvjd1", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5f67xz/cambridge_ancient_history_alternative_reads/dahvjd1/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "[Check out the importance of generals from this topic that was posted last month](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28dtf3/how_important_were_leading_generals_in_ancient/)", "created_utc": 1407945098, "distinguished": null, "id": "cjp4kgw", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dfhl7/what_separated_a_good_general_from_a_bad_general/cjp4kgw/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "I forget the name but the Roman Emperor that converted to Christianity first allegedly saw a comet the night before a battle and took it to be a blessing (he won the battle). It was instrumental in him converting to Christianity (not Catholicism but a branch of Christianity)\n\nSo it wasnt always seen as bad, perhaps rather than bad it was seen as change.", "created_utc": 1398870421, "distinguished": null, "id": "ch605s6", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/24a2lv/why_have_almost_all_cultures_in_ancient_history/ch605s6/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "Do you want pictures/mosaics from the time period or paintings/illustrations from later periods depicting it?\n\nI have a lot of paintings/images on my computer of Ancient Greek and Roman mosaics, paintings etc.\n\nSo do you want 15th century - modern images, or do you want images from that time period?\n\nYou can find all of them online through google but you can check [this] (http://imgur.com/a/WlTPl) out to see if this is what you want.\n\nIf you want mosaics or some other type of images I could upload them.", "created_utc": 1423983764, "distinguished": null, "id": "colyedv", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vvgwr/hey_historians_i_am_look_for_a_gilded_source_of/colyedv/", "score": 0 } ]

[ { "body": "The second edition of the Cambridge Ancient History (CAH) is written by the leading scholars in each separate field, and remains the most comprehensive and reliable overview of the entirety of ancient history. There are loads of small ways in which it has become outdated, and if a third edition were begun today, I am sure it would be totally different, but that is the nature of scholarship, and by the time the next edition is out, that too will be out of date. If you're looking for competence, this is the work you want.\n\nMy main gripe with the CAH is that its focus is very much on political history. It will occasionally go into stupefying detail on individual campaigns or constitutional changes, but generally gives short shrift to social, economic, cultural or military history. For such topics, more recent volumes like the Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (2007) and the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (2007) are essential additions.", "created_utc": 1491949223, "distinguished": null, "id": "dg50xg7", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/64tluy/is_the_cambridge_ancient_history_2nd3rd_edition/dg50xg7/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "This is a very difficult question to answer, but I will do my best to keep it succinct. There are a few ways in which modern historians test the veracity of their ancient sources:\n\n1. Comparing one source to another. While, as you astutely mentioned, there are not always correspondences between sources. However, if there are, it is always helpful to try and glean as much as possible from whatever sources are available. Although, this can pose a myriad of problems. What to do if it seems that Demosthenes is contradicting Thucydides, for example? \n\nOne will need to determine a few things to try and reach a conclusion:\n\nA. Any biases of the authors\nB. Chronological distance from events\nC. The ancient historians' own sources\n\nThese are just three of many helpful paths to determine which author is speaking the truth.\n\n2. What to do if you want to verify Livy, but there are not corresponding sources? Now, this gets a bit tricky.\n\n1. As you said, archaeology can be helpful for us here. If Livy tells us that town X was destroyed by the Romans on Y date, we can attempt to locate the ancient site and search for ruins. This is a useful way of corroborating ancient sources.\n\n2. Another very important method is using inscriptions. This is a whole sub-discipline unto itself called epigraphy. We find hundreds if not thousands of new inscriptions from the Romans world every year. Now, the vast majority of them are banal, but some are quite fascinating. Some may even come to corroborate or invalidate an ancient historians' claim.\n\n3. You may not like this answer, but sometimes a modern historian must use his gut. Unfortunately, a paucity of sources means we have to rely on our scholarly intuition and good judgment. Some scholars tend to be rather pessimistic about the ancient historians, while others tend towards the optimistic. I have yet to really formulate my own thoughts on he topic, but I will leave you with a piece of advice that one of the greatest Roman historians of our generation once told me: \"We, historians of the ancient world, have so few sources, but many of us spend most of our time trying to explain them away.\" \n\nP.S. this is not meant to be an exhaustive account of every way modern historians try to prove the veracity of their sources, but rather a concise recounting of some of the more prominent methods. ", "created_utc": 1450338556, "distinguished": null, "id": "cy20vuu", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3x63l1/how_do_modern_historians_judge_how_accurate/cy20vuu/", "score": 7 }, { "body": "Many of us approach these sources as literature rather than what you'd strictly call 'history'; something like historical fiction, or perhaps more accurately like editorial opinion pieces about historical events.\n\nJust as modern political editorials often talk about history (and often play pretty freely with the actual facts, because they're really mostly interested in their pieces' political implications), ancient authors were almost always using the past to talk about contemporary events and concerns. As a result, it's very difficult to trust their stories to be objective, accurate, or faithful descriptions of actual events. They're *onspired* by actual events, but unless you have other information available about those events, it's often impossible to tell how much the author's literary / political objectives have shaped the underlying 'facts' of the matter.\n\nThat is, it's not just a matter of reading through the bias to see the facts underneath; the facts themselves are, on their own, so tied up in the authors' projects and goals that they all have to be taken with a large grain of salt.\n\nThat's why the best historians do things like /u/gloriasinefine describes to try to verify accounts externally. But even then, you have to be careful with textual sources - just because an archaeological discovery proves, fkr example, that a battle happened doesn't mean the author who describes the battle understood *why* it happened.\n\nIe, we knoe that the Punic Wars happened. But we should still question Livy's description of Hannibal, to see how his version of events fits into his larger goal of glorifying Augustus' Rome.\n\nThe best historical studies takes multiple types of sources (narrative texts,mrecords,minscriptions, coins, archaeology, art, geography, demographic modelling, climate data, etc etc), reads each kind of evidence independently and critically, and then weaves these different pieces together to capture the complexity of past events.\n\nI personally use texts to add color to my work - they provide a perspective on events from at least one contemporary person,s perspective. Just like good journalists quote eyewitnesses to make their work more exciting, but rely on careful contextual research when maki their actual analysis of events.\n\nThis thread may also be helpful: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3uvva1/monday_methodsfinding_and_understanding_sources/", "created_utc": 1450359397, "distinguished": null, "id": "cy26j7q", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3x63l1/how_do_modern_historians_judge_how_accurate/cy26j7q/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "That every generation writes its own history, or rather, that every generation has its own questions to ask from history might be a truism, but that doesn't make it any less true. It's a process, not a task with a defined end condition. But I'll leave the question of philosophy of history for others, since even if it were true that we could one day just stop asking new and different questions about the past, I think that's not in the spirit of what you were asking.\n\nYou might want to look into other disciplines of ancient history, like epigraphy. More than 1.000 new Latin inscriptions from the time of the Roman Empire are discovered every year, regularly, and while many of them are mundane, fragmentary or otherwise don't carry much information, there are often some among them that give us crucial new information. My favourite example, which I have written about here often before just because it is so fitting an example. In 1992, an altar was excavated in Augsburg (the so called 'Augsburg victory altar'), Bavaria, that was erected in commemoration of a victorious battle Roman forces had fought in the province of Raetia against 'Iuthungian' raiders on their return from Italy, carrying booty as well as thousands of enslaved Italian citizens, around the year 260. The battle lasted for two days, and involved both the regular provincial army as well as auxiliary troops and levies, so it was no small affair. But before the discovery of this Altar, no one in modern history knew about this battle. It was simply completely unknown. It also informs us that the province of *Raetia* was part of the Gallic Empire during that time, another fact that hadn't been known before and on which all our other written sources were silent. \n\nThat's just one example of many (and one of the things why I find that discipline so exciting). Even more could be found for social, economic, women's history or other fields. Papyrologists also constantly find new material that enlarges our knowledge about the ancient world.\n\n\nAnother big point is that new methodology, employing databases, GIS, linked open data, network analysis and whatever other buzzwords are hot right now, allows researchers to use the data that are available on a massive scale that hasn't been possible before. Just to give you a recent example, I just read J. W. Hanson, *An Urban Geography of the Roman World, 100 BC to AD 300* (Oxford 2016), in which the author takes all available data on cities from all over the empire to model and visualize things like the spread of cities over time, their amount of monumentality, tries to map things like urban hierarchies or the ordering and clustering of the cities. Such things haven't been possible before, and that's just one example, adding to our information about politics both imperial and urban. Not only do the questions we want to ask change, the way we *do* history is constantly changing, so you don't need to worry that it will stop anytime soon.", "created_utc": 1511389040, "distinguished": null, "id": "dq7knmb", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/7eu97g/is_new_ancient_history_still_possible/dq7knmb/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "Not Pompeii, but monuments to commemorate wars, certainly. Ever heard of [the arch of Titus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_of_Titus)? And if that's not enough, [here's a substantial list of surviving Roman triumphal arches!](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_triumphal_arches)\n\nOn a smaller scale, in ancient Greece it was customary to place markers at the site of a battle commemorating a victory. These were called *tropaia*, usually translated \"trophies\", and involved a decorative arrangement of arms plundered from the losing side. They weren't normally permanent markers; though there were exceptions, such as the burial mound at Marathon (which is still there).\n\nMore permanent, though not as numerous, are memorials with inscriptions placed in the *agora* (central square) of a city. Many of these survive, though some are only attested by ancient sources. This is where the whole idea of the epitaph comes from -- like the famous couplet about the Spartans who died at Thermopylae (\"Go tell the Lakedaimonians, stranger, that here we lie, obedient to their decrees\"; sometimes attributed to Simonides, though it wasn't actually by him).", "created_utc": 1368751371, "distinguished": null, "id": "ca0a9ay", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ehfta/do_we_have_records_of_monuments_or_memorials_from/ca0a9ay/", "score": 3 }, { "body": "There is a description in Egyptian texts of a monument erected the first time ancient Egyptian troops reached the Euphrat.\n\nIts mentioned in my teachers handbook, so I'll try to look up their sources for it in the evening.", "created_utc": 1368786139, "distinguished": null, "id": "ca0ikcg", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ehfta/do_we_have_records_of_monuments_or_memorials_from/ca0ikcg/", "score": 1 }, { "body": "I can think of loads of [victory](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naram-Sin_of_Akkad) [stele](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stele_of_the_Vultures), monuments commemorating important people, stuff like that, but it seems you're asking for something memorializing the deaths or misfortunes of common people?\nIf anything in that vein exists in the ancient near east, I've never heard of it. ", "created_utc": 1368805035, "distinguished": null, "id": "ca0mtqa", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ehfta/do_we_have_records_of_monuments_or_memorials_from/ca0mtqa/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "This might not be what you had in mind for an answer, but honestly your best shot at making this a good piece of work is by making your dissertation revolve around a topic you enjoy. I did my dissertation on comparing the themes of a number of Byzantine treaties. This was simply as my lecturer specialized in Medieval peacemaking and diplomacy, but had yet to explore Byzantium significantly. Is there any work of one of your lecturers that interests you in particular? Can you think of a new angle, a new period or new theme that has yet to be explored in regards to this lecturers topic? Even if you can't, there is always room for new work on a topic. If you take a suggestion from a stranger on the internet you might find you're not that interested in the topic. This will make you dissertation even more of a drag to write and will also make you 'burn out' quickly. I hope this helps. Best of luck!", "created_utc": 1539013934, "distinguished": null, "id": "e7eb4jh", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/9mfls9/help_with_ancient_history_dissertation/e7eb4jh/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "There are a number of ways you can go after studying ancient history. You can go into academia, and teach history or a related field at the university or high school level. Also, there is the realm of archaeology, which is very closely tied to ancient history. Depending on the area of history that your student is interested in, there are jobs in the US working for CRM (cultural resource management) firms, which basically do emergency excavations ahead of construction projects. There are other jobs related to industry in this way, many major building or development companies or public institutions employ people who are knowledgeable in this field to work with people and consult for archaeological problems when construction or expansion or repairs are taking place.\n\nSimilarly, there are positions within the government that deal with cultural resources in this manner. State archaeologists are employed to deal with these things. I know quite a few people who are or were at one time employed by the National Park Service, dealing with various aspects of that, working on cultural resources in the parks and dealing with people as well.\n\nThere is also the realm of museum studies. There are a number of museums which hire people who are knowledgeable about ancient history and ancient artifacts.\n\nIf your student's interest is ancient history outside the United States, it certainly doesn't preclude any of the jobs on this list, but museums and teaching may be some of the things that will be closest to ancient history outside the US.", "created_utc": 1452026416, "distinguished": null, "id": "cyn6lyw", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zlxsi/careers_linked_with_ancient_history_advice/cyn6lyw/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "The first thing I should say is that new sources - both material and textual - are constantly being discovered. The study of ancient Mesopotamia has a shortage of researchers rather than of sources, with vast amounts of evidence still entirely unexamined. More traditional areas of research like Greece and Rome also enjoy an ongoing expansion of the evidence base. Roman settlements and fortresses are excavated all over the former Empire and beyond; just last year, a papyrus dump in Egypt yielded fragments of a previously lost work by the Archaic Greek poet Sappho.\n\nThat said, it is true that most ancient historians do not work with substantial amounts of new material. Mostly, such finds are exclusively known to the finders or the people working on the project until the results are published. So yes, we are mostly working with a known set of sources, and literary historians like myself are travelling and especially well-worn road.\n\nNevertheless, it is always possible to create narratives and theories that make more sense of more of the evidence. This is particularly true in ancient history, where sources are often fragmentary, scattered across time, and representative of only a narrow range of interests and backgrounds. Better ways to understand these sources, to connect them to other forms of evidence, and to place them within larger stories about the ancient world, are constantly being devised.\n\nIt would be idealist and naive if I claimed that our ongoing work is gradually bringing us closer to \"the truth\". We will never know for certain what it was really like to live and work and feast and fight in the ancient world. The cynic would say that we are all hopelessly blinkered by our own biases and frames of reference, and we are merely producing the version of ancient history that is appropriate for our age, just like every generation did before us. However, there are some grounds on which it is fair to say that our view of the ancient world is progressing. Recent ancient history is more inclusive of traditionally silenced voices (slaves, women, non-citizens, 'barbarians'), more thorough in its methodology and theoretical underpinnings, and in some ways less ideologically motivated and therefore hopefully less distorting and selective than some of the Marxist or neoconservative narratives that have gone before.\n\nEvery single subfield of ancient history is progressing in this way, and our understanding of the Greek and Roman past is changing all the time. Almost everything you'll find in a basic textbook on ancient history is now outdated, but only a few specialists know this until someone writes a new synopsis that takes it all on board. For my own field of Greek warfare, I wrote a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3y18lg/what_was_the_most_recent_major_paradigm_shift_in/cyaglzt) a while ago that you might find interesting.", "created_utc": 1458421560, "distinguished": null, "id": "d1618f4", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/4b47en/what_are_some_new_developments_the_study_of_in/d1618f4/", "score": 7 } ]

[ { "body": "What exactly do you mean by \"mysteries\"? Things we don't yet know? There's only so many things that fall into that category, and most of those do so by technicality, since we have quality theories to begin with. You won't find that people write books about things we don't know- that forgoes the basic prerequisite for writing a good book. Our book list on the side bar has good general recommendations for the regions give mentioned. For the Americas, I'd recommend * Cities of the Ancient Andes,* Michael Coe's *Mexico*, and his *The Maya*. I myself am well versed in psuedo-archaeology and conspiracy theories, so I can give more specific recs on topics you're interested in but are frequently burdened with that rubbish: Nazca lines, Tiwanaku, Maya glyphs, etc.", "created_utc": 1444908375, "distinguished": null, "id": "cw0iidd", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3otubh/mysteries_of_ancient_history/cw0iidd/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "The ancient Greeks apparently raised their right arms in a fist as they passed eachother on the road, sort of like a nazi salute except with a fist and none of the ridgedness or negative connotations.\n\nApparently it was to show you were none threatening by showing you aren't reaching for you're sword which was usually on your leftside, meant to grab with your right hand.\n\nThis is apparently also a reason left handed people were mistrusted, because they could raise their hands and then stab you anyway.\n\nEDIT: might also have knocked it against their knees, I've no clue. I wasnt there :P\nI have no sources except my history teacher, sorry :P", "created_utc": 1356840716, "distinguished": null, "id": "c7o3ipi", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/15nluo/historians_please_clear_up_my_misconception_in/c7o3ipi/", "score": 6 }, { "body": "This is not directly related to your question, but you might find it interesting that there is no equivalent to \"hello\" in ancient Chinese culture, which was strictly rule-bound and hierarchical, while \"hello\" implies a sort of formality and egalitarianism as to rank and title. The same is probably true in other non-western cultures. \n\nsource: Erbaugh, Mary S (May 2008). \"China Expands Its Courtesy: Saying 'Hello' to Strangers\". *The Journal of Asian Studies*, Vol. 67, No. 2 (May, 2008), pp. 621-652", "created_utc": 1356915279, "distinguished": null, "id": "c7oi8wu", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/15nluo/historians_please_clear_up_my_misconception_in/c7oi8wu/", "score": 2 }, { "body": "I am unaware of exact hand gestures used in greeting, but there are multiple ways to say hello and goodbye in both Latin and ancient Greek. Here are a few of them. They take the imperative form of the verb, so they are literally commands that someone be well or be strong. \n\nLatin:\n\n*Salve* (sing.) *Salvete* (pl.) - -from the verb *salveo*, \"be well!\" -- used for greetings \n\n*Ave*, *avete* -- from the verb *aveo*, \"be/fare well!\" -- used for greetings \n\n*vale*, *valete* -- From the verb Valeo \"to be strong/well!\" -- generally means goodbye\n\nGreek: \n\nΧαίρε (Khai're), Χαίρετε (Khai'rete) -- \"rejoice!\" from the verb χαίρω, \"to be full of cheer/to rejoice\" This one was used both for greetings and farewells. \n\nΟύλε (Ou'le), Ούλετε (Ou'lete) -- \"be whole/sound!\" from the verb οὔλω. Used as a greeting, although this was a more archaic form usually found in Homeric Greek. \n\nEdit: Format. ", "created_utc": 1356862766, "distinguished": null, "id": "c7o7l89", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/15nluo/historians_please_clear_up_my_misconception_in/c7o7l89/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "This is entirely dependent upon the school where you choose to study and what requirements they have in place. There are many universities out there that offer classical antiquity degrees which require some study of Latin, Hebrew, and/or ancient Greek. There are also plenty of universities which do not have such strict requirements.\n\nIf you are truly dedicated to the historical study of a particular era, however, it would be nothing but beneficial to have some understanding of the languages and scripts pertaining to that area.\n\nKeep in mind that anyone who studies primary source documentation translated into another language is reliant on a third party for the translation. This isn't necessarily a deal breaker, it just means you have to be careful about what translations you use.\n\n", "created_utc": 1510270921, "distinguished": null, "id": "dplht8f", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/7bx72a/do_historians_of_ancient_history_have_to_know/dplht8f/", "score": 2 }, { "body": "There was actually [a super interesting discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e340e/the_concept_of_classics_the_health_of_the/) on this very topic a couple years back. As well as the distinctions between ancient historians, and Classicists and the demand (and roles) for both.", "created_utc": 1510286726, "distinguished": null, "id": "dplukl5", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/7bx72a/do_historians_of_ancient_history_have_to_know/dplukl5/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "Not to discourage other responses, but [my answer to a similar question 4 months ago here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5hjgl2/was_depression_and_mental_illness_as_prominent_as/db0rzsx/) should at least provide some background knowledge about what we can and can't know about mental illness in ancient history.", "created_utc": 1493796046, "distinguished": null, "id": "dh2eg1u", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/68yuws/is_there_any_evidence_in_ancient_history_of/dh2eg1u/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "Not meaning to discourage further debate, and I realise that your question has a slightly different focus, but here's [yesterday's thread on ancient PTSD](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4i6yxy/is_there_evidence_of_ptsd_in_soldiers_during/), with references to earlier posts from the FAQ.", "created_utc": 1462734669, "distinguished": null, "id": "d2xpkcw", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/4if1ov/did_any_army_leaders_in_ancient_history_recognise/d2xpkcw/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "People certainly did. As an example, Herostratus, who burned the Temple of Artemis to the ground, admitted that he did it and further claimed that it was so that history would never forget him.\n\nAs a side note - and this is just my opinion - I don't think humans and their nature have really changed much over the course of history. I can't speak to either Shakespeare or Beethoven, but I'm sure that there were lots and lots of people who desired to become famous in whatever cultural milieu they could grasp for that fame. Obviously there was no twitter, but people used whatever they could.", "created_utc": 1439742735, "distinguished": null, "id": "cu4y88k", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3h72hy/what_was_the_dynamic_of_being_famous_like_before/cu4y88k/", "score": 9 } ]

[ { "body": "You might be interested in this section of our Popular Questions wiki (the link is in the sidebar): [Cross-cultural communication and lingua francas](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/language#wiki_cross-cultural_communication_and_lingua_francas).", "created_utc": 1393717971, "distinguished": "moderator", "id": "cfs1qod", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zaeec/how_people_overcome_language_barriers_in_ancient/cfs1qod/", "score": 1 }, { "body": "A 'grammar book' as you put it is the worst way to learn a language, immersion is the best way to learn. Ancient traders and explorers would gradually pick up phrases from locals, the same way you would if you went to live in Paris for a year.", "created_utc": 1393780917, "distinguished": null, "id": "cfsin7t", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zaeec/how_people_overcome_language_barriers_in_ancient/cfsin7t/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "I'll give it a try. This is a huge topic, so I'll gloss over some of the details that are maybe not entirely correct but more or less get the idea in favor of adding missing details or correcting false ones. Seems like you've done some good research already though! \n\nYou are correct that a lot of hominid evolution (such as bipedalism) was spurred on by living in savannas instead of forested environments. However, it was less that our ancestors moved out of forests and more that climate change resulted in a contraction of forests in Africa. Environments that were previously forest dried out and became savanna with patchy forests, forcing our ancestors to spend more time on the ground and ultimately develop bipedalism.\n\nLet me make a correction to your explanation of human migration out of Africa. Australopithecines never left Africa. The first human species to leave Africa was *Homo ergaster* (previously known as *Homo erectus*) which made it to Europe and most of Asia. Otherwise, you've got the right idea about the spread of *Homo sapiens*.\n \nYour discussion of the origins of agriculture is more or less correct, but you are missing probably the most important component that led to domestication, which is the Broad Spectrum Revolution. \n\nWith the Pleistocene coming to an end and the general warming of the planet, a lot of the megafauna which early humans exploited heavily (e.g. mammoths, aurochs, giant reindeer and bison, etc...) began to die out and be replaced with either smaller varieties or other species. Partly because of this, humans generally began to diversify the kinds of resources they exploited. In short, they had to use a lot more kinds of resources to meet their subsistence needs than they did before. This has two important consequences in that populations were generally more sedentary than before and people had a new kind of relationship with plants and animals. When before you had people following herds of animals across the landscape, you now had people generally staying in a more limited region (but still moving through that area) and exploiting geographically restricted resources on a seasonal basis. For instance, moving up to the mountainsides to exploit the stands of oak for acorns in the fall and them moving to the coast to hunt seal during the winter. Additionally, this Broad Spectrum Revolution brings people into a much closer relationship with certain plant and animal species, laying the ground work for manipulating them on a yearly basis. For instance, harvesting squash along a river in a particular season and selecting seeds from the largest squash to plant and collect in the following year. All of this eventually leads to your Natufians relying on stands of wild wheat for subsistence, but you see the same pattern basically everywhere else on the planet.\n\nFor the origins of agriculture, I'll just make a few corrections. While the Olmec are one of the first complex, sedentary, and agricultural societies in Mesoamerica, they didn't invent agriculture there. There are some smaller-scale agricultural societies prior to the Olmec. In fact, the major agricultural staple corn was likely domesticated in central Mexico much earlier than the first Olmecs down on the Gulf. That said, some very early corn has been found in the state of Tabasco in the Olmec homeland. \n\nFor South America, as far as we know, the Norte Chico cultures didn't actually begin as agriculturalists, but rather transitioned to agriculture *after* they started building monumental architecture and exhibiting other characteristics of complex societies. They began by domesticating and growing cotton rather than food crops, likely to weave nets to better exploit the rich fisheries off the Pacific coast of South America. \n\nFinally, it is important to note that crops were domesticated and sedentary agriculture was invented independently in both Western Africa and in the eastern woodlands and Mississippi valley of North America. \n\nThe origin of states and complex societies is not a subject I'm going to touch in much detail, because it is a huge and quite contested topic. Suffice to say, there isn't really any one explanation for why people started living in states. What seems to be the case is that a lot of different factors contribute to people becoming sedentary farmers and living in states, and those factors aren't necessarily the same in all of the places were early states emerged. I've added two sources with differing perspectives on state formation, but know that that is a vast and diverse field of research.\n\nIn general though, the push towards sedentism and agriculture seems to be motivated not by technology or domestication of plants, but by population pressure. As populations worldwide began to grow, the land available for people to use to support themselves began to shrink. This can lead to a lot of different catalysts for state formation. For instance, warfare to take control of resources. Alternatively, you have a situation where adopting agriculture is an effective strategy for producing more with a smaller amount of land. It is actually probably harder to support yourself as a farmer than as a hunter-gatherer. However, if you don't have the option of being a hunter-gatherer because of population pressures, being a farmer beats starving!\n\nAs for relevant societies, don't forget what is going on in the New World and South Asia (India-Pakistan). You have early states in South America such as Chavin, and in Mesoamerica such as the Olmec.\n\nJust a note, but you might be overestimating the importance of metalworking and writing. You have tremendously complex states in the New World that function without any writing, or very minimal writing, and by mostly using stone instead of metals. As you mention, complex social organization isn't tied to having metals, although many of the societies that pioneered metallurgy did have complex social organization. \n\nI suppose the last thing I would add is that it this is a very particular story of the development of state society, but even after the development of states and complex societies, large portions of the population on the planet didn't live in particularly complex societies. Just as some perspective, even though we make a big deal about the first cities and how significant they are, the majority of the population of the planet didn't live in what we can call cities until as recently as 2008. There are still hunter-gathering groups making a fine living today, and many times more if we go back 200-300 years. Not that you imply this in your post, but it is important to talk about how non-state societies change and developed over the course of the last ~5000 years just as much as state societies because that is just as much a significant part of human history as the story of states and cities and such. \n\nSources:\n\n* [Miocene climate change](http://www.helsinki.fi/science/now/pdf/Micheels_etal_2009.pdf)\n\n* [Broad Spectrum Revolution](http://www.pnas.org/content/98/13/6993.short)\n\n* [Earliest corn in Mesoamerica](http://www.pnas.org/content/106/13/5019.short)\n* [Norte Chico cultures](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/ap3a.2004.14.037/abstract;jsessionid=82DC53630836E90C2FB2EB378FA86CEE.f02t02)\n* [Warfare and the state](http://beta.industrydocuments.library.ucsf.edu/documentstore/t/g/h/k/tghk0127/tghk0127.pdf)\n* [Craft specialization and old world states] (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1022801712684#page-1)\n* [Urban population](http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2007/UrbanPopToBecomeMajority.aspx)\n", "created_utc": 1424054589, "distinguished": null, "id": "comoun7", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w0ohb/is_this_sketch_of_ancient_history_correct/comoun7/", "score": 2 }, { "body": "I can't really answer your question, though from my amateur perspective it seems like your view is correct in very broad strokes. I did want to say that you may want to ask people in /r/AskAnthropology as well, particularly about the early, pre-history aspect of your narrative.", "created_utc": 1424045990, "distinguished": null, "id": "comkorl", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w0ohb/is_this_sketch_of_ancient_history_correct/comkorl/", "score": 0 } ]

[ { "body": "I would recommend reading any notes or preface to a book. These often explain the methodology behind dates, translations, and names. As a general rule most Western books will be using the Gregorian calendar. In societies where the Julian calendar was used (such as Russia), writers will let you know how they are dating. Western writers typically will put the Gregorian calendar date with the Julian date in parenthesis. They may write \"O.S\" for \"Old Style\". So the February revolution my be written as starting March 8th, 1917(O.S. March 23, 1917). In my go-to book on Russian history *Russia and the Soviet Union* by John Thompson, he outlines in his preface this mentality. Since he is catering to a Western audience, he uses a western dating system. ", "created_utc": 1458578346, "distinguished": null, "id": "d17zzh4", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/4bclbf/when_we_read_dates_on_ancient_history_books_is_it/d17zzh4/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "Three books on antiquity that I have found to be of great quality and encompass a wide geographic area are: \n\nBabylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization by Paul Kriwaczek - \nthis book is a great history that focuses not just on Babylon but the entire Mesopotamian/Near East region. It covers the creation of the first cities like Eridu to the Persian take-over of Babylon by Cyrus.\n\n1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline -\nI can never recommend this book enough to people. It is written by one of the world's top scholars on the Late Bronze Age in a way that's easily accessible to lay readers. The geographic area covered by Cline covers places like Mycenae to Anatolia, and the Near East. Cline does an amazing job illustrating the connections between Bronze Age civilizations in this book.\n\nGhost On The Throne by James Romm-\nThis book is primarily a narrative history covering the years following Alexander The Great's death. It heavily focuses on the Macedonian elite but also includes how their power struggles influenced regions like Afghanistan and India.\n\nI hope this helped!", "created_utc": 1498885195, "distinguished": null, "id": "djmwwpp", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/6khmdp/looking_for_book_recommendations_for_ancient/djmwwpp/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "This was asked a [few days ago](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/187xwo/how_did_commanders_of_armies_in_antiquity_control/). Here is [my answer](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/187xwo/how_did_commanders_of_armies_in_antiquity_control/c8cfksp) on post-Marian Imperial Rome.", "created_utc": 1360596582, "distinguished": null, "id": "c8d8snr", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/18b6ol/how_did_military_commanders_communicate_orders_to/c8d8snr/", "score": 9 } ]

[ { "body": "“Israel’s history and the history of Israel” by Mario Liverani who is a well regarded specialist of ancient Near East history should be a good starting point. This book is on askhistorians recommended list on the subject of Ancient Israel.", "created_utc": 1525408648, "distinguished": null, "id": "dyf9a7s", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/8gt4mt/need_some_ancient_history_help/dyf9a7s/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "Never ask 1000 different historians what they find interesting, because you will always get 1,000 different answers. For me, the most interesting is just how people lived in the Early American Republic.", "created_utc": 1337611775, "distinguished": null, "id": "c4qjudc", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/txhr0/what_time_in_ancient_history_had_the_most/c4qjudc/", "score": 4 }, { "body": "I say 1200s. You have the crusades, mongols invading just about everyone in Asia.", "created_utc": 1337625028, "distinguished": null, "id": "c4qmldk", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/txhr0/what_time_in_ancient_history_had_the_most/c4qmldk/", "score": 4 }, { "body": "Around 200 CE everything went to hell. The Maurya, Han, and Parthian Empires collapsed and Rome was crippled by civil wars. Also, aroung 2200 BCE, the Chinese Neolithic and Indian Bronze civilizations suddenly collapsed, and Mesopotamia and Egypt were shaken.", "created_utc": 1337626762, "distinguished": null, "id": "c4qn0kt", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/txhr0/what_time_in_ancient_history_had_the_most/c4qn0kt/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "I highly recommend *The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World* by Cyprian Broodbank, which covers exactly what you're looking for. \n\nFor the later periods especially, see *The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean* by David Abulafia.", "created_utc": 1506290592, "distinguished": null, "id": "dngihyz", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/727wna/trying_to_find_good_reading_material_to_link_the/dngihyz/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "FYI, there's a section on restaurants in the \"popular questions\" FAQ\n\n[Restaurants](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/dailylife#wiki_restaurants)", "created_utc": 1377664748, "distinguished": null, "id": "cbwsvn0", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l8h4g/whenwhere_did_the_concept_of_restaurants/cbwsvn0/", "score": 3 }, { "body": "Some form of restaurants have existed since antiquity, either as fast food/street food or tavern/inns which served food, but the restaurant as we understand it today really began in 18th century France\n\nI would encourage you to check this website. http://www.foodtimeline.org/restaurants.html\n\nThey pull a lot of different great sources together to give you an interesting picture of the historical development of restaurants\n\n", "created_utc": 1377665219, "distinguished": null, "id": "cbwt0ts", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l8h4g/whenwhere_did_the_concept_of_restaurants/cbwt0ts/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "Hi, questions on pre-history are worth cross-posting to our sister sub, /r/AskAnthropology. While there are some anthropologists here (and you may get an answer here), there are more over there, and with a greater specialization in earlier time periods.", "created_utc": 1475178255, "distinguished": "moderator", "id": "d87bvag", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/553zjh/are_there_any_inconsistencies_or_mysteries_with/d87bvag/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "For Classical Greece, there's a couple of reasons. The main one is that the city-states had no professional army and no money to create one. Their military forces were literally the population in arms. Since most people could not afford to leave their farms and shops for very long, campaigns had to be short and decisive. Pitched battle was better suited to this purpose than skirmishing, raiding and siege.\n\nOf course the Greeks strained against these limitations, knowing that prolonged campaigns by mercenary or specialist expeditionary forces could entail less risk and bring more profit to them. Even so, the ideal of a quick (and cheap) decision remained attractive, not least because it was the most straightforward way of imposing one's will on the enemy. An army abroad would find more safety in a direct approach than in a slow and tentative campaign that allowed the enemy to take initiatives of his own. Meanwhile, an invader would win a moral victory if he got to ravage enemy land without encountering resistance; men who watched their farms burn from the safety of the city wall would generally be spoiling for a fight. For these reasons, even the forces despatched for longer campaigns often ended up fighting pitched battles too.\n\nThat said, the Greeks were very careful to avoid pitched battle if they felt that they would be fighting at any kind of a disadvantage. They wouldn't engage unless they were confident of their numbers and skill, and ideally they would look for some suitable ground and try to take the enemy by surprise. Even if there was a moral imperative to fight a pitched battle, everything was done to make sure that battle would not be fair.\n\nBecause of the risks involved, pitched battles were actually not common. Considering the fact that \"ancient history\" covers a period of several thousand years, and even the age called Classical Greece lasted a century and a half, we actually know very few pitched battles, and even less are actually widely known among a general audience. The ancients agreed that the bloodiest and most protracted conflicts of their past were the Peloponnesian War and the First Punic War; can you name a pitched battle from either?", "created_utc": 1460565915, "distinguished": null, "id": "d21cea5", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ejs5f/why_were_there_so_many_famous_pitched_battles_in/d21cea5/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "For most of antiquity there was an indigenous population called the [Pelasgians](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelasgians) living in Greek speaking lands that was already then understood to predate the Greeks. \n\nItaly had a [lot of different peoples](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_peoples_of_Italy) living in it before they melded into a general Roman identity during the centuries, the most famous and probably most significant being the [Etruscans](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_civilization). The Romans themselves had a [national mythology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeneid) of being descendants from the Trojans, but I don't know how seriously they took it. ", "created_utc": 1414347214, "distinguished": null, "id": "clkcpbf", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kdbbx/who_were_the_old_greek_or_the_old_romans_to_the/clkcpbf/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "[This is literally the first question in the Asia section of the FAQ](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq#wiki_asia)", "created_utc": 1394715623, "distinguished": null, "id": "cg1jeam", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/20baen/how_did_the_chinese_and_indian_population_grow_to/cg1jeam/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "I think in general there were a lot of rulers or people in general, who would be today diagnosed as sociopaths. They simply did not have the same norms as us today, thus didn't judge their actions as we do today. They didn't know human rights, they allowed slavery, gladiator fights, killing minorities(jews,christians...) etc.\nToday we would declare every single person, who thinks these things are alright, sociopathic, sick, unhuman, etc..\n\n", "created_utc": 1389174289, "distinguished": null, "id": "cekc4xt", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uoy78/are_there_any_famous_sociopaths_in_ancient_history/cekc4xt/", "score": -5 } ]

[ { "body": "I'd like to add to the question if I may. The only logical explanation I could imagine was that STD's might be more common in adulterous relationships. Does this explanation hold any truth, and if so, would STD's have had a significantly higher mortality rate in ancient times? Were there ever instances of viewing the sicknesses as divine punishment?", "created_utc": 1391026357, "distinguished": null, "id": "cf21wdb", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wdv5r/why_was_adulterysex_looked_at_as_a_negative/cf21wdb/", "score": 2 } ]

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[ { "body": "I can speak to the Biblical background of anti-Judaism. Like the mod above I also specify anti-Judaism because when it's religious, it isn't antisemitism, it's anti-Judaism. Unlike the Nazis, the primary marker of Jewishness for a Christian who hated Jews was not blood – though this becomes complicated, especially as we forge toward the modern era.\n\nMany of the accusations levied against Jews through late antiquity and the medieval era stem from the Bible, warped understandings of the Bible, and crazed conspiracies as developed from those Biblical issues.\n\nLet's focus on Matthew. It's generally held that Matthew was written by a Jewish Christian for a Jewish audience. It has many allusions to the Tanakh, especially prophetic literature. Its goal has two parts: first, to convince \"Matthew\"'s Jewish audience that Jesus was the Messiah. Secondly, to argue that humanity and Judaism in particular failed the Messiah. Significant passages in the history of anti-Judaism are drawn from Matthew. Matt 27:25 illustrates it. Pilate says he won't kill Jesus. The crowd, feverish, demands it. Not only that, they shout: \"[Let his] blood be on us and on our children!\"\n\nThis certainly reads like an anti-Jewish polemic, but it's more complicated given the context.\n\nWhen Matthew writes this, he isn't writing it as a modern Christian removed from Judaism. He isn't writing as a member of an in-group lambasting an out-group, or a dominant religionist attacking a minority religion. Matthew should be read in light of the catastrophic Jewish revolt and the destruction of the Temple in 70CE. Some scholars argue for a period prior (mostly to miraculize Jesus's predictions of the event within the story) and say it anticipated the carnage (not unreasonable given the tensions between Judaea and Rome) but many of these are non-secular scholars trying to make a religious case. I'm not secular either, but I'm not making a religious case here.\n\nThe famous passage where Jesus says the Temple has been made a \"den of thieves\" is one of those earlier references to prophetic literature. He's referring to the Book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah, a real man edited over time and by followers, is saying that the Jews have violated their covenant with God and that God is watching. Not only that, he says that God is warning them time and time again and being ignored. The Book of Jeremiah anticipates the destruction of the First Temple, likely because of the additions after the fact. But it's this detail that Matthew is referring to when he quotes Jesus. The Second Temple will be destroyed, same as the First, because the Jewish people have violated the covenant. In this case Matthew tacks on the charge of failing the Messiah and allowing him to die to the earlier failures. He is, like many Jews have at many points in Biblical and post-Biblical history, recalling an earlier anguish to make a call for his own people to shape up.\n\nOther Jewish commentators like Paul make parallel claims about Jews and Judaism, like his famous idea of the \"spirit\" and the \"letter\" of the Law. But Paul wasn't some Christian coming out of nowhere to write a polemic, he was a Jew who believed Christ to be the fulfillment of Judaism.\n\nThere's another dimension here, and that's Rome. Jesus was, of course, not killed by the Jews. The Sanhedrin did not have him executed – though Josephus tells us the Sanhedrin executed his brother James. Rome executed Jesus because they wanted him dead. Crucifixion is a severe punishment for severe crimes. Notably, rebellion. Christians hoping to dodge some heat from Rome might have preferred to blame Jews (whether from the inside in the case of \"Matthew\" or from the outside) because disseminating a bunch of texts about how Rome killed their God. It was hard enough as is for a Christian circa Nero, getting mouthy isn't gonna help.\n\nAll of this becomes secondary to political and economic concerns on many occasions. French nobility were not concerned with the blood responsibility for the death of Jesus when they expelled Jews after racking up debts to them. But it does lay an ideological groundwork.\n\nAmy Jill-Levine's Jewish New Testament is a good source to learn more about Christianity in a Jewish context, as well as the relations to Judaism early on.", "created_utc": 1681508172, "distinguished": null, "id": "jga70dq", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/12ltsdc/why_is_antisemitism_so_prevalent/jga70dq/", "score": 156 }, { "body": "I'm glad to see the auto moderated post about anti-semitism. It gives a great base for this conversation and I encourage reading that and exploring the sources in the FAQ. Firstly anti-Judaism is arguably a more apt term for the time periods we are speaking of, racialized concepts are much more modern but for consistency sake I will just use the term anti-Semitism as a catchall. \n\nFirstly these are very long periods of time over vast areas that we are talking about and anti-Semitism is much more localized or philosophical (deicide) before the 11th/12th century. Before this period violence against Jewish communities is much more sporadic and the Christian world was more comparable to the historical Muslim world, which remained relatively non-violent even after the Christian escalation. I do consider this divergence an interesting contrast, with the escalation of Jewish conspiracies and violent persecution in the Christian world a more recent phenomenon than many people think, violence did happen in the Muslim world (such as the 1066 massacre in Grenada) but remained rare throughout the medieval time period. Violence really begins to escalate around 1200AD and you see a noted difference in the response of rulers to this violence as anti-Semitism develops. As to why the increase in violence we cannot say for sure but there are several theories and major factors. It seems somewhat tied to the crusades (Even if we accept that the crusades were a major reason for the rise it then begs the question of what caused the crusades, but that's the nature of history.) and increase in violent religious fervor but other factors such as a refocus from paganism, religious centralization, and others are important. While Jewish communities were not a direct target of crusades they were sometimes lumped into the \"other\" category and faced violence. This happened not just in the middle east but also in the south of France (crusades against Cathars). Jewish people were frequently seen as subjects protected by their lord during early violence, Richard the Lionheart's reaction to Jewish massacres' and the reaction of lords in Spain to similar events are examples of this. This changed as Jewish conspiracies became more normalized. Blood libel conspiracies start to form and become popular during the 12 century first in England and later the rest of Europe with mobs frequently lynching Jewish people. Only a century after the initial reaction of condemning the violence the later King of England became more complacent or complicit in anti-Semitic violence, with Jewish people being expelled from England in 1290. Expulsions happened before this point but were usually more localized in scale, in France it was partly a financial move to get rid of debt. You can see in various maps (http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/gifs/expuls.gif) of Jewish expulsion and the years it occurred. Expulsions picked up in the 11th century and escalated throughout Europe. Many areas with a significant Jewish population (especially pre-Holocaust) can be tied to these expulsions. \n\nTo compliment the auto mod post and expand more to answer your question lets take a look at a specific part. My research was more on the origins of modern racism (which is tied very strongly to anti-semitism) and generally the \"why\" aspects of these things seems more interesting to me. It does seem to be a peculiar western obsession riddled with hostile conspiracies and one that can transcend the political spectrum. \n\n\n>Jews long remained in this position of only available religious minority, and over time they were often made very visible as such: discriminatory measures introduced very early on included being forced to wear certain hats and clothing, be part of humiliating rituals, pay onerous taxes, live in restricted areas of towns – ghettos – and be separated from the majority population.\n\nPagans states lasted until the 14th century with the conversion of Lithuania but in most of the Christian world there was no presence for centuries at this point. The process of conversion varies by region (often leading to synctretic practices) but quickened once a Christian plurality was achieved on a local or regional level. The total Christianization of communities left the Jewish diaspora as the most significant minority group in many regions and a large part of the scapegoating of Jewish people is simply that they were one of the only groups that were allowed to exist throughout the Christian world. This speaks at least to means and opportunity of the persecution. There are vast periods of time between Christianization and the rise in anti-Semitism but it is a prerequisite. Areas sometimes saw expansion of Jewish communities which were later persecuted, Jewish populations in England for example followed the Norman Conquest and were expelled 200 years later after rising accusations of blood libel and various conspiracies. Of course the presence of Jewish people was the case for centuries before violence started to ramp up so its not only about opportunity. Areas conquered from Muslims (primarily Sicily and Spain) would also see various levels of tolerance or persecution for Muslims with a much smaller period of tolerance. In these regions religious persecutions of Muslims and Jewish people would often be part of the same initiatives. The leadup to this (what caused the increase in medieval Europe?) is something historians will continue to speculate and research about. \n\nThe forced conversions of these groups, particularly in Spain, led to discrimination by \"blood\" (Christian heritage) and ties strongly into the birth of modern racism. This proto-racism aspect of Christian heritage may have been one of the major frameworks build from to justify slavery along racial lines after the initial religious justifications started to falter (along with a few other preexisting beliefs). After this point the history will become much more familiar. Jewish people were increasingly differentiated as an outgroup in some areas of Europe as nationalism and racism developed and from that background antisemitism further escalated from the 19th century into a fervor in the 20th century. This period of modernization and general social change saw conflict between several ethnic groups but Jewish people in particular were increasingly seen as an internal enemy with various flair ups feeding into each other. In France the Dreyfus Affair led to an increase in antisemitism including riots. In Russia the conquest of Ottoman/Polish areas led to a significant Jewish minority, while initial persecutions were mostly a result of conflicts with Greek communities it later became more and more common in Russian communities to hold anti-Semitic beliefs. Local issues become populist and national in scale as modernization pushes groups together. A massive wave of antiemetic rioting followed the assassination of Tzar Alexander II based on anti-Semitic rumours and conspiracies only leading to more. In Britain the initial condemnation of pogroms and sympathy (keep in mind Russia in a rival) didn't last once Jewish immigration/refugees arrived. Germany of course had its own horrific development. \n\nI can't speak with much detail to the rise of anti-Semitism in the Islamic world but post Israel Jewish communities were expelled or migrated from many historically tolerant areas. This leaves much of the modern holding anti-Semitic beliefs, having a history of such beliefs or involvement with those who do for various political/nationalist/racist/ideological reasons.", "created_utc": 1681517367, "distinguished": null, "id": "jgargk8", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/12ltsdc/why_is_antisemitism_so_prevalent/jgargk8/", "score": 11 }, { "body": "Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. **Please [Read Our Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) before you comment in this community**. Understand that [rule breaking comments get removed](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/h8aefx/rules_roundtable_xviii_removed_curation_and_why/).\n\n#Please consider **[Clicking Here for RemindMeBot](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12ltsdc/why_is_antisemitism_so_prevalent/%5D%0A%0ARemindMe!%202%20days)** as it takes time for an answer to be written. 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[ { "body": "First, thanks for doing the AMA. You've been a rock-solid contributor for a long time now, and I don't think it's far off to say that you are one of the most important posters here; many of your previous posts have made it to /r/DepthHub and /r/bestof, and I think it's fair to say that you're personally responsible for a solid portion of AskHistorians's growth. Thanks. I'll totally buy you a beer some time.\n\nSecond, I have several questions, all in a theme:\n\nIn a conversation about Herodotus last week, you remarked that \n\n>many continue to use Herodotus as the basis for their image of Near Eastern history between 700-480 BC. ... He is often the only source that Classicists have used for their entire image of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, along with Xenophon's Anabasis. This is where the image of the Persian Empire as a horde of bogeymen comes from; I think that modern historians have often gone too far in the other direction, and made the Persians seem like superduper Utopian world uniters, but the image of the Persians as crude, effete, decadent despots that they reacted against is one that Herodotus accidentally generated.\n\nCould you expand on this somewhat? What has recent research taught us about the Persian empire? It seems you've already indicated that it's problematic, but to what degree does the traditional narrative of Western (Greek) \"freedom\" as opposed to Oriental despotism hold up in recent scholarship? \n\nHow does the Hellenic world differ from the Hellenistic? And, in particular, what elements of Greek culture were brought to the Middle East by Alexander's conquest and the subsequent \"Hellenistic\" period? It seems that I'm constantly hearing about how the Greeks conquered the Persian empire and, despite Alexander's early death, transformed the Middle East. What exactly did they bring, and how did things change?\n\nNext, the Romans are often described as the heirs to the Greeks in Western Civilization. I know this might be a bit out of your time period, but do you think this is an accurate assessment? What specific elements of Greek thought, culture, politics do the Romans adopt and develop?\n\nAnd, lastly, we often locate in the Greeks the origins of the West. Western Civ surveys are sometimes referred to as \"Plato to NATO.\" What elements of ancient Greece are with us today? Are there substantial institutions developed in Greece that we continue to rely on? Or are the Greeks more of a distant mirror, people in whom we see ourselves but who did not necessarily or uniquely contribute to our contemporary world?\n\nI know these are substantial questions, so take your time and answer as little or as much as you like. I look forward to it.", "created_utc": 1348677393, "distinguished": null, "id": "c6dqwnn", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/10ia6p/wednesday_ama_ancient_greek_history_near_eastern/c6dqwnn/", "score": 35 }, { "body": "Who neighbored the Greeks? \n\nWhenever I think about ancient history, I know *of* the civilizations, but not really the context from what they evolved from. I more-or-less understand the peoples the Romans invaded, and Europe seemed pretty \"crowded\", or, rather, full of different peoples then. But for Greece...I don't really know. Googling informs me of the Phoenicians. And of course the Egyptians were near there. But I'm more interested in Greece itself. Did any people live there before the Greeks? Did the earliest greeks just sorta wander there and decide that was a nice place to build a civilization? Where there other humans already living there, and if so, what were they like? When they created Athens, were there weird hunter gatherer people scratching their heads over what was going on over that hill? \n\nI understand that it's likely that the Greeks just evolved their culture where they had been living forever. But who were their neighbors? Hunter-gatherers, other, now-mostly-forgotten cultures, or was there just no one around them? When they first built their cities (or polis), were these cities out of the norm for the area, or do they only seem so significant in retrospect because of how much of our intellectual heritage came out of them?\n\nHope you understood my question. Thanks.\n", "created_utc": 1348671834, "distinguished": null, "id": "c6dpgaf", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/10ia6p/wednesday_ama_ancient_greek_history_near_eastern/c6dpgaf/", "score": 12 }, { "body": "Thanks for doing this. My questions:\n\n- Why did the greeks create the Marseille colony?\n- Was the Marseille colony mostly transplanted geeks or locals converted to the greek way of life?\n- How independant was it after created?\n- What goods were traded by the greeks up and down the Rhone and Saone rivers?", "created_utc": 1348671927, "distinguished": null, "id": "c6dph2v", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/10ia6p/wednesday_ama_ancient_greek_history_near_eastern/c6dph2v/", "score": 12 } ]

[ { "body": "It's a matter of dynastic longevity and volume of surviving sources.\n\nThe Koryŏ dynasty ruled from 918 to 1392, and the Chosŏn from 1392 to 1910. So if you want your story set at any point in the thousand years from 918 to 1910, it *must* be set in one of those two eras.\n\nThe Koryŏ and Chosŏn were the two most recent eras in premodern Korean history, and the historical documentation for those two is simply overwhelming compared to earlier periods. Consider the \"orthodox histories\" (*chŏng sa*), an East Asian historiographical genre referring to a series of authoritative histories compiled by an army of state-funded historians (e.g. China's *[Twenty-Four Histories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-Four_Histories)*). For narrative historians of Korea, and hence for popular media creators, the *chŏng sa* are usually unparalleled in volume and reliability.\n\nThe main official histories of Korea are:\n\n* *Historical Records of the Three Kingdoms*, or *Samguk Sagi*. The official history for 57 BC to 936 AD. Approximately 192,000 Chinese characters.\n\n* *History of Koryŏ*, or *Koryŏ Sa*. The official history for 918 to 1392. Approximately 3,370,000 characters.\n\n* *Veritable Records of Chosŏn*, or *Chosŏn Sillok*. Length: Approximately 49,650,000 characters.\n\nNot to mention that while very little in the way of narrative history survives outside the *chŏng sa* for the Three Kingdoms period, and things are similar, if not quite as dire, for the Koryŏ too, the sheer volume of preserved Chosŏn-era documents is staggering in both volume and variety of genres.\n\nSo there's simply far, far, far, *far* more material to make TV shows about for the Koryŏ and especially for the Chosŏn than for any earlier era in Korean history.", "created_utc": 1570190224, "distinguished": null, "id": "f2ebsy9", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/dcz5m1/korean_historical_dramas_usually_emphasized_the/f2ebsy9/", "score": 6 } ]

[ { "body": "I wrote about one example of how history and archaeology are used together [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rkbq74/comment/hph7rsu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) which may be of interest to you.", "created_utc": 1681736014, "distinguished": null, "id": "jglsyla", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/12mhgiz/how_do_we_separate_history_and_archaeology/jglsyla/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "So to start out, I will say that Moses Finley and his slave society vs. society with slaves idea is still a very important part of the historiography of slavery studies. It is still commonly cited in academic work on the topic. That said, it has definitely had criticisms leveled towards it over time. I believe that *What Is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective* (2018) edited by Noel Lenski and Catherine M. Cameron is a good example of what I mean. The entire book, made up of sections written by more than a dozen academics who study slavery all over the world, is both fundamentally based on Finley's argument, and an attempt at expanding past his perhaps simplistic, overly-Marxist analysis of the five slave societies.\n\nA common criticism from scholars within this work is that following Finley's own definition of a slave society, one could argue that there were far more slave societies than Finley's five. What was Finley's definition of a slave society? According to Finley, a slave society is indicated by:\n\n1.\tSlaves constitute a significant percentage of the population, i.e. 25% or more.\n2.\tSlaves have an economic role in surplus production.\n3.\tSlavery has widespread cultural influence.\n\nFollowing Noel Lenski's own commentary on the significance and history of Finley's model, which he criticizes for being ethnocentric (focused entirely on 'Western' societies) among other things, he make the case for why or why not other, non-European societies may fit the model. Among these include the Sokoto Caliphate and Dahomey of 19th Century West Africa, Northwest Coast American Indians in the 18th and 19th Centuries, and Fourth to Second Century Sarmatians, among others, all of whom could meet those three criteria.\n\nKim Bok-rae and Anthony Reid have two sections near the end of the book where they talk about the Eurocentrism of Finley's model. They discuss Joseon Korea and Southeast Asia as a whole, respectively, and how the terms of slavery used by Finley do not conform to the broad spectrum of unfreedom that existed outside of his analysis. Both of these regions could be interpreted as containing slave societies depending on how one defines them, for example, the *nobi* system of Korea. This difficulty with definitions is also not limited to discussions of slavery outside of Europe. Books like *Slavery After Rome* by Alice Rio and *Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World* by Youval Rotman both have to contend with the fact that in Medieval Europe and surrounding regions, the terminology of slavery was much more complicated than just the simple word, \"slave.\" The Byzantine Empire had over a dozen Greek words which could variously mean slave, servant, etc., some of which were also applied to high officials including the Emperors themselves (i.e. as \"servants of god.\"). This adds to how complicated it is to apply Finley's model outside of his examples - What exactly *IS* a 'slave,' if they aren't simply called that? It is impressive how much time is devoted to the debate surrounding the non-applicability of this one English word which might have a dozen local variants in other languages, none of which perfectly match the English definition.\n\nLenski and other authors also criticize Finley's model for its potential imprecision. It can be difficult or even impossible to measure some of those three criteria, for example through the difficulty of measuring slave populations without a proper census record, quantifying the economic role of slaves in economic systems fundamentally different from that of Europe (especially among indigenous Americans), or determining what exactly constitutes significant cultural influence from slavery.\n\nAll of that said, Finley's model has yet to be truly replaced within the historiography of global slavery. There are always going to be problems with trying to create a model to quantify a practice that goes back to the very earliest stages of human history, and while a lot of these sorts of grand overarching theories are looked at by modern historians with some disdain, Finley's model has proven to be resilient given how often it is still cited in modern scholarship. The exception are his five slave societies. Some scholars might accept that these represent the best models for a slave society versus a society with slaves, but they have also thoroughly demonstrated over the years that the idea of a slave society can be applied to societies around the world throughout history, especially when you allow for the idea that his model cannot truly capture the myriad of examples of unfreedom found throughout human history.", "created_utc": 1683155287, "distinguished": null, "id": "jirfkj6", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/136v0ls/mi_finley_a_scholar_of_classical_economics_argued/jirfkj6/", "score": 142 }, { "body": "I won't try to extend a global historical answer on the topic of slavery across all history as that task is PhD level but I will instead talk about Finley.\n\nBy today's point most of the works of Moses Finley have been expanded on immensely and it has mostly been superseded by a deluge of new works and findings especially with regards to archaeology. Indeed I would say that in general Finley tended to disregard archaeology's contribution to the field and it has caught up with him in many ways when confronted to new approaches. But do not get me wrong his importance in the field is undeniable he introduced a lot of paradigms, concepts and systems that carry on their importance in the way we approach the historical subject. He remains one of the most cited authors in ancient studies (In english at least). For more on that I reccomend the article Measuring Finley’s Impact article by Walter Scheidel.\n\nUsually the order of popularity of his books are The Ancient Economy of 1973, followed by his book The World of Odysseus of 1954. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology of 1980 comes in third place.\n\nThat is where he introduces this concept that centers your questions. The fake and \"true\" slave societies. Basically for him a society is not a \"true\" slave society if it is simply a society with slaves. To be a \"true\" slave society it had to be an essential aspect of the society self-definition and can't function in the absence of slaves. Or as he put it \"Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without slavery, no Roman empire.\"\n\nNow does it hold up nowadays? The answer is not really. This concept has been added to and is not very flexible. Very polemic debates have also entered the fray in question to the differences between ancient and \"modern slavery and how they differ from one another (or not depending on who you read or the way it is presented or defined). For an interesting discussion on that topic you could read [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10dsprd/in_which_ways_do_ancient_slavery_differs_from_its/) discussion on the subject by /u/commercialismo\n\nBut back to Finley and his definition of true slave societies. I would say that like most of his work there is influence can be felt when studying the subject especially when it comes to the paradigms that he wanted to introduce to the study but they have been expanded, changed, revised. For more on that I would tell you to read What Is a Slave Society?: The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective by Noel Lenski and Catherine Cameron.\n\n​\n\nI hope this answers your question partially at the very least.\n\n​\n\nSources:\n\nFinley, M. I. The Ancient Economy. Berkeley, : University of California Press, 1999.\n\nFinley, M. I. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. New York: Viking Press, 1980.\n\nFinley, M. I. The World of Odysseus. Harmondworth: Penguin, 1982.\n\nJew, Daniel, Robin Osborne, and Michael Scott. M.I. Finley: An Ancient Historian and His Impact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.\n\nLenski, N., & Cameron, C. (Eds.). What Is a Slave Society?: The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.\n\nScheidel, Walter. “Measuring Finley’s Impact.” M. I. Finley, 2016, p.288–97.", "created_utc": 1683155472, "distinguished": null, "id": "jirfzc7", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/136v0ls/mi_finley_a_scholar_of_classical_economics_argued/jirfzc7/", "score": 32 } ]

[ { "body": "Caveat: I am most familiar with the history of Syria prior to the Achaemenid period, and my reading recommendations reflect that. \n\n# **HISTORICAL OVERVIEWS**\n\n*Ancient Syria: A Three Thousand Year History* by Trevor Bryce is a good first introduction. Bryce relies too heavily on textual sources at the expense of archaeological data, but it's the most readable narrative history of ancient Syria I've read so far.\n\n*Syria 3000 to 300 B.C.: A Handbook of Political History* by Horst Klengel is the most detailed overview of the political history of ancient Syria, though it's badly in need of an updated edition. \n\n# **ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY** \n\n*Ebla to Damascus: Art and Archaeology of Ancient Syria* is a pretty decent introduction to art from ancient Syria. It's best used in conjunction with the more detailed *The Archaeology of Syria* by Akkermans and Schwartz. \n\nAlso see the series of beautifully photographed catalogues produced by the Metropolitan Museum:\n\n* [*Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus*](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Art_of_the_First_Cities_The_Third_Millennium_BC_from_the_Mediterranean_to_the_Indus)\n\n* [*Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.*](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/beyond_babylon_art_trade_and_diplomacy_in_the_second_millenium_bc)\n\n* *Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age*\n\n# **BRONZE AGE** \n\nWilhelm's *The Hurrians* remains the best monograph on the Hurrians, though it cannot be emphasized enough that our knowledge of Hurrian history and language have advanced considerably since its publication in 1989; Neu's 1996 publication of the Hittite-Hurrian bilingual and the excavations at Urkesh since 1984 have been particularly important developments. \n\n*Mari and Karana: Two Old Babylonian Cities* is an extremely readable introduction to two of the most important sites in Syria (as a heads up, many scholars now identify Tell al-Rimah as Qattara, not Karana). Sasson's *From the Mari Archives* contains a fascinating collection of the most interesting letters from Mari. \n\nUgarit, the most important site in Syria in the Late Bronze Age, has an extensive bibliography. Yon's *The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra* and *Ugarit: Ras Shamra* by Adrian Curtis are the best places to start. Itamar Singer's detailed political history of Ugarit is available in *Handbook of Ugaritic Studies* as well as *The Calm Before the Storm: Selected Writings of Itamar Singer on the End of the Late Bronze Age in Anatolia and the Levant*. \n\nFor the contemporary site of Emar, see Chavalas' edited volume *Emar: The History, Religion, and Culture of a Syrian Town in the Late Bronze Age*. \n\n# **IRON AGE** \n\nLipinski's *The Aramaeans: Their Ancient History, Culture, Religion*, Niehr's *The Aramaeans in Ancient Syria*, and Younger's *A Political History of the Arameans* are the best overviews of the Aramaeans, but they're probably more detailed and expensive than you're looking for. \n\nFor the Neo-Hittite kingdoms, there's Melchert's edited volume *The Luwians*, now heavily out of date in places, and Trevor Bryce's *The World of Neo-Hittite Kingdoms*. \n\nI also recommend the video lecture [The Syro-Anatolian City States: A Neglected Iron Age Culture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IvYKZ0Jr7g), courtesy of the Oriental Institute in Chicago. \n\n# **OTHER RESOURCES**\n\nThe standard ANE resources contain a lot of good information about ancient Syria. \n\n* *Civilizations of the Ancient Near East* (4 volumes) edited by Jack Sasson\n\n* *The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant* edited by Killebrew and Steiner\n\n* *A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East* (2 volumes) edited by Daniel Potts \n\n* *The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy* by Mario Liverani\n", "created_utc": 1525913018, "distinguished": null, "id": "dyqb0e3", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/8i9u97/helpsuggestions_on_what_books_to_read_pertaining/dyqb0e3/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "\nThe Chinese character 天 (tian, pronounced like the alpabets T N read out loud quickly) is the one most usually translated to as \"Heaven\" - but it can also have a more prosaic meaning as \"sky\". This division isn't quite rigid as it is in English - as with every language it's meaning depends on the context. Think of the character as encompassing the words sky-heaven-Heaven: that is, the physical,visible area above our heads with clouds, a metaphysical realm, and a .... Organised entity with vague connotations of power and goodness. More on that last part later.\n\nHence, I'm interpreting your question as two parts: \n\nWhat did the Chinese mean when using the character 天, and when and why was it translated into the English as Heaven (with a capital H)?\n\nCaveats:\n\"Chinese History\" is pretty damn broad - geographically, ethnically, chronologically, etc. Since this is r/askhistorians I will attempt a chronological explanation of the term as it has evolved in Chinese usage. \n\nI'm going to rely heavily on the Classical Chinese philosophers, firstly because their scholarly legacy in the Chinese tradition means they are so accessibly transcribed, along with contemporaneous annotations that were themselves passed on and annotated, and secondly because the \"practical\" application (hijacking?) of their concepts in governance by various Chinese states meant that they were actively disseminated, influencing the way a significant portion of the populace saw their world - from folk religion, narratives of legitimate authority, state-sponsored cults, architecture, erotica, etc.", "created_utc": 1676300294, "distinguished": null, "id": "j8dkhia", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/10sb7xv/what_is_chinese_heaven/j8dkhia/", "score": 3 } ]