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Life in the Ancient World
Duffel
jacobkoshRegistered User regular
jacobkoshRegistered User regular
Ancient societies are a source of constant fascination to us. We stare in awe at their accomplishments, we're rendered speechless by their decadence, yet are shocked by their cruelty and callousness. Many ancient societies were examinations in extremes - slaves with no rights whatsoever served rulers of nearly unlimited authority, crushing poverty existed alongside incredible extravagance, and widespread illiteracy and ignorance surrounded thinkers who laid the very foundations for our own society.
And, yet, despite it all, the lives of our ancient ancestors were much more like us than we might think. The needs and goals of the common member of society were the same as those we have today. Ancient people grew up, got jobs, got drunk/laid, got married and basically lived their lives doing the same things we do today - without the benefit of a few millenia of scientific advancement and historical wranglings to help them do it.
So, in this thread, we'll be talking about life in your favorite ancient societies. Everything's fair game in here - whether it's the ancient Roman nightlife, Egyptian religious practices, Mesopotamian scientific research, Greek athletics or anything else you might be interested in. As long as it pertains to the lifestyles of our ancient ancestors - be they kings, priests, soldiers, farmers, or slaves - then you can discuss it here. Primary sources get bonus points.
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And to think people still say the pyramids were built by slaves (it even made it into the dialogue of an episode of Firefly, an otherwise perfect series). They were not only built by workers, but by surprisingly well treated workers.
imagine if literally every single book written in the western world was destroyed except for four. four books. those, and wall inscriptions, are all we have to go on for the entirety of their civilization. and we're not anywhere near able to translate their language perfectly. perhaps we never will.
four books. un fucking believable
makes me wanna go and kill all the spaniards for what a few of their ancestors did
Other programs I've seen give me the impression that temples were big business back then and might be something like mega-churches now-a-days, mixing worship with spectacle.
Slaves are reasonably valuable. Malnourished slaves with untreated broken bones don't get much built.
Indus river valley and Roman toilets are also cool.
Byzantine chariot team fans make soccer fans look like pussies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots
Roman entertainment was often awesomely excessive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naumachia You don't see blood sports like those anymore.
They were buried next to the pyramid. The Pharaoh of course kept living slaves in the pyramid to serve him after death, but being buried next to the pyramid was an honour. Other things buried next to the pyramid include the funeral barges and the queens. Extending this honour to slaves as well would be odd.
Also, if you've seen a schematic of the Great Pyramid, you know there's this weird weight-support area on top of the King's Chamber? As was pointed out in the other thread, there's no writing on the walls of the pyramids. But that weight-support area is not supposed to be accessible from the outside, so the workers didn't have qualms putting graffiti on its walls. Basic inscriptions like who moved the stone. One of the teams moving the stone called itself "Friends of Kufu". I don't know of any slaves ever considering themselves friends of their master.
Basically, Egyptian "citizens" (mainly the farmers) got drafted to work on the pyramids in between harvest seasons, which are extremely predictable due to the flooding of the Nile. The advantages of using free workers instead of slaves are manifold - you can let them go back home when their labor shift is done, so you don't have to keep feeding them, they're much less likely to revolt (seriously, tens of thousands of slaves all in one place is practically begging for a revolt), it keeps society stable because there isn't a huge chunk of the year where the farmers don't have anything to do and no means of making money, it doesn't have the problems that come with slavery - namely acquiring them and knowing what to do with them when the pyramids were completed, just to name a few.
Google has some books that link to that phrase:
http://books.google.com/books?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS343&=&q=friends%20of%20khufu&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wp
"Friends of Khufu" was one of the names of the teams building the pyramid.
Edit: Nation Geographic, 2001:
strange that people still take that as established fact
he's french, you know
They may not be exactly ancient, considering their place in history along the discovery of the Americas, but someone else mentioned the Maya so fuck it.
The story of war and utter social collapse the Easter Island heads hint at is pretty eerie, as well. There's evidence that some of the toppled heads were used as shelters for a time by people during the fall of the Easter Island civilization.
Then after shit went down, the people started restructuring themselves as kind of a bird worshiping, peaceful society, and then Europeans came and wiped them all out with disease and European-ness. Oops.
The citation on that is "A.Altenmüller, A. M. Moussa, in Studien zur altägyptischen Kultur 18 (1991), p. 36", who I have no idea who is.
IIRC there were semitic peoples from up the coast who were used in other building projects in the northern part of Egypt, which doesn't sound like much of a stretch to me - it's not very far away once you look at the map - but not necessarily the pyramids themselves.
Of course, during this time period using the term "Jews" would be a misnomer anyway; Judaism as we know it didn't emerge until thousands of years after the pyramids were built.
EDIT: Beaten by Couscous so hard.
That's certainly not the kind of thing you can prove or even really back up (I have no idea why he picked that century), but I've always remembered it because it's so cool (and likewise horribly depressing) to think about. :P
Edit: Thanks, internet:
Let me tell you about a fellow who lived 200 odd years before Christ. He was alive when the Roman Republic existed. It had one of the first democracies in the world, and it had just begun to establish its power over the Mediterranean. Rome controlled a vast area around Rome itself, and was in the processes of massive expansion. One of the larger powers at that time was Carthage; they had vast trade routes between the far eastern Mediterranean and the tip of northern Africa. The two powers fought 3 wars, called the Punic wars.
During the 2nd Punic war, the Romans fought and were very scared of a man named
Hannibal.
They almost had an industrial revolution around the time they fell.
They discovered steam power, but, much like the Aztec with the wheel, only used it for a toy.
Of course, even that probably wouldn't have stopped the empire from falling.
He brought elephants over the goddamn Alps! Wouldn't you be afraid of him?
...I'm going to take a wild guess and muse that the professor's theory about Romans and spaceflight likely had something to do with the small steam engines the Romans had (I think they were posted in the previous thread). Transposing the evolution of engines and locomotion from modern times into the Romans' era would probably yield the timeframe he was talking about.
Edit: Dammit, I need to learn to type faster.
Technically, he brought elephant over the Alps. Only one survived. And both he and it lost an eye doing so.
The Romans were pretty hardcore. Very much like the Egyptians who built the pyramids, they would plant crops in the spring and harvest in fall, leaving half the year to spend at war. This was, of course, before the army was professionalized by the Marius reforms.
And for those of you who've never read about the origin of the Pyrrhic victory, I suggest you look up the name Pyrrhus of Epirus. The Romans did not give up easily.
over
Honestly, I'm way to high to write what I want to write at the moment. That can wait until tomorrow morning.
In the mean time, Hannibal, with a smaller army, crushed the Roman Legions at the river Trebbia. Roman Legions were pretty badass military forces in their day. They were well equipped and trained, and their leaders were often competent generals. If you could field an army it meant you controlled the country side and a lot of people; this meant a lot of political power came out of an army. They had been expanding relentlessly, and mostly fought fairly disorganized barbarians and much smaller states. Hannibal was a tactical genius, and used clever plans to defeat much larger forces. In the Battle of Trebia Hannibal destroyed (like, two thirds casualties for the Romans) the two full legions Rome had sent after him.
He did the same at Lake Trasimene
Over? Motherfucker went through. In some places.
Drums in the darkness.
You're confusing the early Roman Republic with the late Republic and Empire. Prior to the Marius reforms the Roman army was a conscripted one. The army itself was scrabbled together from essentially every land-owning man in the country, all of whom provided their own armor and weapons. Tactics were rudimentary at best, typically devolving into mass charges and retreats.
The Romans won so many early wars not because of tactics (their generals were by and large incompetent; look at how long it took for them to finally realize Fabius "the Delayer" had the right idea) but because they consistently vastly outnumbered their opponents. This was because the Romans screwed like rabbits and did not suffer from the decadent decay that most Greek colonies suffered. Whereas a Greek colony's population would literally shrink over time, Roman colonies grew exponentially. The Romans could field armies of at the time unprecedented size, which gave them a substantial advantage.
I don't want to trivialize the Romans here though; far from it. They were ruthlessly brutal and, as a rule, stupidly courageous soldiers. There is a very good reason that the Republic grew to twice its size in the 100 years between Marius and Augustus, even despite the political corruption and dictators like Sulla. Legionnaires were amongst the best trained and best armed soldiers of the day, and the tactical prowess of generals like Agrippa is nearly as legendary as that of Hannibal. But this all took place after the Second Punic War.
EDIT: And you even forgot Hannibal's most famous victory at the battle of Cannae.
Wasn't Rome a republic until Ceasar?
And yeah I was going to get to Cannae, I wanted to soften you guys up with some of his easy and comparatively small battles. I'm not really in a position to write something like that at the moment, I'd need charts.
A woefully underrated ancient military commander. Everyone always remembers Hannibal. Anyone who stomped on the Romans in every battle he fought them is a pretty tough dude, given their record.