When Roman “Barbarians” Met the Asian Enlightenment
medium.com
medium.com
> Imperial Rome was a dim backwater by comparison
This is a slippery claim, especially when you consider how long the Roman Empire lasted and how widely its relevance and regional dominance swayed over its lifetime. During its peak, Rome spanned dozens of cultures on two separate continents and liberally imported other peoples and norms into their own. That's not to say that the contemporaneous Chinese empires didn't do the same, only that the distinction between the two in this aspect is less stark than the author would have us believe.
> Rome’s legions were fighting fiercely for control of Gaul (modern France and Germany), Britain, Egypt, and various parts of the Balkans; while a succession of (often unfairly maligned) emperors scrambled to hold Rome together through an endless series of famines, wars with the East, coups d’état, refugee crises, and revolts.
This is not strictly false, but it's again muddied by the extreme duration of the Roman Empire. The Pax Romana lasted for two centuries, spanned three major political dynasties, and is generally the period people think of when they think of the Roman Empire (or Rome in general). By the time the Chinese Empire(s) had begun trading silk with the Roman Empire, peace was already the norm in the Roman world.
The author is correct in his characterization of Rome as less artistically and creatively inclined than it perhaps ought to have been, considering its size and wealth during its peak. That being said, Rome's accomplishments in architecture and culture are visible (and audible) everywhere in the Western world. I don't think that any one Eastern power of the same period can claim such cultural permanence to any comparable degree.
The premise of the article is flawed too, we don't know enough about the 'chinese' skeletons yet: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbe...
"The truth is, though, that Rome’s Asian contemporaries completely dwarfed Rome in almost every respect: heritage, population, cultural diversity, technology, architecture, medicine, philosophy, poetry… I could go on, but you get the idea."
Read this article with a grain of salt.
Well you could read the rest of the article and see if the statements hold up...I see nothing in your comment that justified what was essentially censorship on your part.
There's a few points where he exaggerates or otherwise overstates comparative claims about Rome, but his research into the antiquity cultures of Asia Minor/the Middle East is both accurate and refreshing considering how little recognition they get outside of anthropology and (specialized) classics. The comparison of contemporary Chinese and Roman power is also a valuable one - it's not often brought up in either one's respective historical studies.
It's worth keeping in mind that this is a Medium post by a blogger. It's not peer reviewed, and it should be read with the author's opinions and goals in mind.
> Imperial Rome was a dim backwater by comparison.
And it was, by comparison. Why do people have the audacity to think that Rome alone was greater in all aspects than the collective synergy of Persia, India, China, Swahili Coast etc? These regions were in extensive trade and cultural contacts and the cold hard truth is we Europeans were not a central part of that scheme. That's why Asians devised decimal system, paper currency, and wooden block printing, compass, and other ground-breaking inventions, due to its sheer vibrancy.
No, Indians devised the decimal system, wasn't adopted by the rest of Asia. Instead it spread west and was adopted by Europe before the countries east of India.
> Asians devised paper currency
No, China devised paper currency, wasn't adopted by the rest of Asia, but was adopted by Europeans when they encountered it.
> Asians devised wooden block printing.
Again this was China and it didn't spread to neighboring countries for centuries.
> Asians deviced compass.
Just China and was adopted by Europeans before other Asian countries...
So most of your examples were adopted earlier in Europe than in Asia, so it seems like Asians mostly traded goods and not ideas.
And stating that Rome was a backwater country is patently false given that they had by far the most advanced architectural techniques at the time. They might not have been the most advanced in every field, but it is not like they were that far behind either.
Now to nitpick your claims:
> Indians devised the decimal system, wasn't adopted by the rest of Asia
I'm pretty sure the Persians, Arabs, Tibetans, Samarqand, and South-East asians were using decimal system extensively. It was adopted pretty much widely in Asia. BTW India is in Asia, and that makes them Asian.
The compass was adopted by the central asian and south asian sea fairing states. It simply didn't leap from China to Europe.
> they had by far the most advanced architectural techniques at the time.
Which is a grand and unsubstantiated claim. The Great Wall Of China, Indus valley grand megapolis, Persepolis etc stand witness to the grand architecture of the East. Rome while had great architecture, wasn't necessarily superior to any of these.
> The Great Wall Of China, Indus valley grand megapolis, Persepolis.
Those doesn't require more advanced architectural skills than just knowing how to pile bricks, Greece and Egypt built similar things long before the Romans. Roman architecture allowed them to build impressive stuff with far less effort which is why they were able to build hundreds of aqueducts.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Segovia_...
Also most of the Great wall of china was built more than a thousand years after Rome's prime, so it doesn't count. The ancient parts of the wall wasn't much more than a very long rock fence, not really comparable to roman aqueducts.
So building aqueducts is impressive than building a complex functional megapolis, in the bronze age, with top-notch sewer system, with millions of people? Not sure what to make of this claim. I would still love to see evidence of the 'impressive stuff' that Romans built that was way ahead of all of the world civilizations.
...originally was mostly made of rammed earth and wood; it was rebuilt using brick only during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The Great Wall that tourists take photos on today has very little in common with the primitive Wall of two thousand years ago.
Actually, it was superior and that was thanks to a very impartial thing - concrete. You have concrete, you can build things that others without concrete can't. That's it!
I'm pretty sure the author went to great lengths to ensure that it is patently obvious to the western reader that the article should be taken with a grain of salt. In fact, that's the entire point of the author's writing style...
If other words, if you think the thesis of this article (that Asian cultures were objectively dominant over Roman culture) is the intended take-away, then you've kind of missed the point of the article.
You sound quite defensive for a throwaway account. (If you're the author, your article has lots of good research on the details of Asian empires, but making broad claims about history is something which should be approached with caution).
Kind of like how an article whose "thesis" is that we should eat children probably isn't actually suggesting we literally should eat children, even while making a vigorous argument for its thesis.
Or are you also flabbergasted when someone suggests "A Modest Proposal" wasn't an actual proposal?
What the author did in this piece wasn't exactly satire, but it is using hyperbole to make a point about a form of bias in historical writing (cultural exceptionalism).
> If you're the author
I am not. But I enjoyed that article on its own merits, and seeing a nice piece of work trampled over by people who completely missed the point of the piece angers me.
>...but making broad claims about history...
The point of the piece is not to make broad claims about history, but rather to critique the sorts of broad claims that are often made when history is written from the perspective of a culture that views itself as exceptional. The fact that the claims are so hyperbolic as to make people angry is... kind of the point -- c.f. modest proposal.
I thought that was patently obvious from the tone and content of the piece.
> it’s always made me sad to think of the Romans being largely cut off from the main action on the world stage.
This is incorrect because the Romans knew about Greece - in fact they ran the place.
The Romans were barbarians, in a sense, I suppose, just compared to Greece. They didn't do anything that could compare to the Greeks in math or philosophy, for example. And by, say, the fall of the Roman Empire, India had far more interesting philosophy (sadly little known because not very accessible) than Rome, so sure, "Asia" had better philosophy than Rome (really India specifically). But it turns out that Indian philosophy was heavily inspired by Greek philosophy (highly recommend The Shape of Ancient Thought for anyone interested in Greek-Indian intellectual exchange), and I wouldn't say it was better (though I wouldn't say it was worse either). Rome wasn't cut off from the best of philosophy - they were just too practical to care much about it - and they knew it and said as much.
Philosophy I know something about - I dropped out of the PhD program at Harvard after studying quite a bit of it. But some of the other parts seem dubious or of questionable importance. Architecture? The Romans look pretty good to me there, and I mean they even used concrete. Medicine? Let's be serious: almost all medicine before the 1800's was placebo. Population? So what?
This is definitely the case. Barbarian was a greek term centered around greece; while romans managed to avoid the label most of the time, they definitely fell into the category at points, e.g. in their worship of the Lares during the Republic.
> But it turns out that Indian philosophy was heavily inspired by Greek philosophy (highly recommend The Shape of Ancient Thought for anyone interested in Greek-Indian intellectual exchange), and I wouldn't say it was better (though I wouldn't say it was worse either).
Definitely. I will say that the philosophies in the original vedic texts are possibly the oldest things we can call "philosophy", even though the more popular hindu/buddhist derived philosophies were heavily hellenized by the fall of the roman empire. I also think that development of a koan, the "simultaneous truths", would have been vehemently rejected by the greek philosophers of which I am aware. Though they still had "middle road" type thoughts, it was not based around the acceptance of two contrary truths, even though you can form such a dialectic that way. Does this match up with your understanding? Do you know of anything framing vedic-derived philosophy in greek-derived terms? I often get swamped in the details when attempting to read through the material directly; doubly so for the ridiculously archaic older texts.
> Medicine? Let's be serious: almost all medicine before the 1800's was placebo.
Not quite true; Galen was an excellent surgeon, covered basic sanitation (e.g wash the wound and then bathe it in vinegar), and was THE reference until our knowledge of anatomy improved starting around the renaissance. But in this respect, the Romans certainly dominated the greeks, and their ability to treat soldiers on the field with the "state of the art technology" was absolutely crucial for the maintenance of a standing army, especially during periods of expansion (e.g. the tail end of the republic).
However, they had lost their edge by the fall of the empire to neighboring powers. That goes for nearly everything but IIRC engineering secrets, which were simply lost.
The Greeks never had a lasting widespread empire, and warred amongst themselves a lot in their golden period. Yes, Alexander conquered all the way to the Indus, but as soon as he died, his empire splintered. The Romans, on the other hand, built an empire that lasted for centuries, and their culture as we see it is not defined by a mere handful of names.
Maybe the Romans didn't exceed the Greeks at philosophy, but they certainly and uncontestably exceeded them at statecraft, which is why it's odd to hear them called 'barbarians' in comparison.
Which is to say the Romans assimilated into their conquered cultural betters.
And I think the Romans knew they had the strengths you describe and the weaknesses I describe - and in the case of some Romans explicitly preferred it that way. Again that's not well described as a society that is "cut off" from anything.
I am Greek so you can take the following with a big fat pinch of salt but, yes, yes we did have a "lasting widespread empire". We have it still: it's called the Western Civilisation. The Greeks conquered, not with swords and shields, but with philosophy, art and science.
The Romans carried Greek culture along with them wherever they conquered. In the East, Greek philosophy reached India [1]. Arab scholars transcribed Greek philosphers' works and carried them over to the Middle Ages where they were picked up by Christian monks, themselves followers of a religion built on holy scriptures written in Greek (the Evangels, or, Gospels [2]). Most of early Western science either confirmed or refuted the ideas of the Greek philosphers [3]. Greek mathematics still form the basis of mathematical knowledge today [4]. And who knows what else was lost to war, or natural disasters [5].
I am very well aware of the fact that I would have been equally proud of my history were I to be British, or a descendant of the Mongols, or even a modern citizen of the USA. However, I'm not- I'm Greek and I'm proud to be a distant relative of a people that has gone down in history not for having the vastest empire, or the most fierce warriors, or the most brutal war machine, but for having kickstarted civilisation.
Even today, you go to the capitals of the world and you see "Grecko-Roman" architecture built when people want to show the world that they dont' just have power, but brains also.
You can bet yer keister we damn well conquered an empire. We conquered several of the things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yavanajataka
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almagest
I won't really contest this. Yes, Greece is today and has been for the last few hundreds of years an intellectual backwater. That's the course of history, right? We've had our five thousand ish years of dominance. Who can ask for more?
I also agree that many other cultures laid the ground for the Greek civilisation- the ancient Greeks themselves liked to say their civilisation came from Egypt.
I say in another post that we should be really speaking of a human civilisation (and thank whatever deities, or blind luck, that we have it). Civilisation does not stop at national borders, fortunately.
Also: big pinch of salt; I did say that at the very beginning.
Still, I'd like it to be remembered that one particular people was very influential and went down in history not because they slaughtered thousands or millions, but because they produced a lot of knowledge.
I'm proud of this as a Greek but we should all be, it's our shared heritage and we must remember that we are at our best when we build, not when we destroy.
But ultimately, it's silly to have this kind of nationalistic association, because the Greeks of the golden period had a very different society to modern Greeks. Where is your Athenian direct democracy? Where is your Spartan warrior cult? Where are your slaves? Where is the widespread demand for Greek-educated workers? Where are your city-states, each having their own international relations and cultural aspects?
And, ultimately, where is the modern Greek's love of learning and knowledge, for which we lionise ancient Greece? As far as I can tell, the modern Greek is no more interested in education than any other typical modern European. I live in the biggest Greek-population city outside of Greece itself, in the Greek-est suburb, and my experiences are that modern Greeks love life and family most, and aren't so interested in higher learning, art, and music (no more than any other demographic). Yes, ex-pat Greeks are a little different culturally to native Greeks, but not that much. It's not like modern Greeks have a particularly notable reputation for education, like Jewish people do.
Ancient and modern Greece are two different places, as were the Greeces in-between, just like modern Italy is not Rome, even though they use the same alphabet.
Let's not have a fight over this. I take the start of the Minoan civ to be the beginning, some 3.5 kya, and the fall of Constantinople to be the end of the Good Old Days, followed by a few hundred years of decline. That makes very nearly 5k years.
I resent the accusation of nationalism. I can wear my rose-tinted glasses all I like (and you're free to laugh at me all you wish) but I'm pretty sure my right to be proud of my heritage does not deny others' right to be proud of theirs [1]. As far as I am concerned a patriot is someone who loves their country, a nationalist is someone who hates everyone else's. I am very confident I'm not the latter.
>> Ancient and modern Greece are two different places
Totally no objection about this. You can't have 5k ish years of history and remain the same people throughout.
>> It's not like modern Greeks have a particularly notable reputation for education, like Jewish people do.
That's alright. Another part of my definition of "patriot" is someone who loves their country regardless of its history, or current condition. It's nationalists who long for the Good Old Days (of Empire, usually). Although for the kind of Good Old Days I'm talking about, of brilliant intellectual achievements, I would make an exception and say that I do wish we hadn't declined as far as we have.
So, happy now? You broke my heart and rubbed my face in my own dirt. Can't an ancient people be left to decline in peace?
___________
[1] If the descendants of the Mongols or the Brits feel robbed of their right to be proud of being the biggest butchers in history, I consider that to be their problem.
I'd like to add that the distinction we use now to indicate differences between Eastern and Western culture/art/and music are largely artifacts of how things evolved after a key point in time.
I know the most about Music, so I'll speak to that. What we speak of now as "Western Music" is largely tonal or functional harmony, and it has its origins in ancient Greece around the time of Pythagoras. But it was a mixture of the Eastern chant tradition with the applied Mathematical and logical rigor of Hellenistic Greeks that provided the foundation for what would eventually evolve to what we now know it as.
For about 1000 years, the early Christians mostly followed in the tradition of Eastern chant traditions with some additional codification and structure in what we now call Gregorian Chant. A guy named Boethius described texts by Pythagoras, Aristoxenus, and Plato, and was reprinted in Renaissance Italy and got some attention there.
And--just as that several generations tried to do by superimposing Greek Philosophy onto the Church doctrine of the time--misinterpreted/mistranslated those pieces of information onto what was at the time a developing, but still fairly primitive version of polyphony.
What happened from there happened pretty quickly and is well known. [1]Zarlino, Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg, etc. Pop music took over the mantle of tonal music right about the time that "classical" composers were getting funky and atonal in the mid-20th century, and has largely stuck with it.
Everything you hear on the radio that is popular is directly traceable to Bach (and unfortunately much less interesting). The work of Bach himself was the almost-inevitable evolution of what happened when Greek thought met Eastern chant.
[1] Before the Boethius reprint in Italy in the late 15th century, the chant style that originated in the Church was, in fact, evolving to certain types of polyphony . . . some of it quite beautiful, and instrumental music was also becoming its own separate thing rather than just an accompaniment to a singer. There was a weird time when a lot of mathematics were applied to the generation of music in the 14th century, and you can find examples of music from this period that are so odd, you could mistake them for mid-20th century art music. But this is a) mostly happening in France and the Netherlands, and b) well before Greek philosophical thought really took fire and spread across a more modern Europe.
Also, this is really broad, and I'm leaving a lot out. Bottom line is that we call it Western Music Theory or Wester Music because the mixture of central Asian and Greek traditions evolved in the way that it did and continues to be separate from purely Eastern musical traditions where Greek philosophy did not take a strong hold.
It's a label of convenience to describe the result of a long process; it's not intended to reflect some kind of a pure origin.
Also, it's funny because what we consider "Greek" music nowadays is in the Eastern canon, influenced by the music of the Ottomans and the Near East in general (For example, see [1], a traditional Turkish song given Greek verse and performed in Greece since the 1930s at least). I myself play the Ney [2] and the toubeleki (darbuka [3]), and consider them both "traditional" or "folk", like most of my friends.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDzXPLX8JdQ
Abstraction meant that instead of learning ad hoc practical recipes for art, science, culture, etc, the West has always had an interest in developing symbolic systems of representation that allow formal modelling, manipulation, and prediction.
Universality meant that truth was external to society, and independent of social status. It's the theoretical basis of much Western politics ("All people are equal") but it's also the foundation of much science, which combines abstraction with universality to find reliable invariants.
Asian cultures were very inventive in specifics - sometimes more so than Western culture. But they never aimed for abstraction and universality in the same way. The tendency was more to group knowledge into hierarchies of virtue, and to privilege subjective experiences over objective invariants.
In your example, Western music is what you get when you get both abstraction and universality applied to sound. There's abstraction in that the music is written before it's played, which makes it possible to create complex abstract structures on paper that can be built slowly and expertly for maximum effect.
And there's universality - less successfully, perhaps - in the sense that there's a belief in a primary set of invariant relationships between the elements of sound.
Eastern musics have some different attempts at universality, but so far as I know there was never an interest in abstraction in the same way. E.g. Indian classical music has systems, but they're more like rules for improvisation, not rules for building structures out of notes without actually playing any sounds at all.
The critical thing about abstraction is that it can be a huge amplifier of creativity, because you can prototype ideas, systems and experiences symbolically without having to build/generate/perform them in the real world first.
And the interesting thing is that we're only just getting started with it. Science has mostly been a success, but there's a lot mileage in other areas. Computers are one step along the way, but there's a lot more about abstraction still to be discovered and enjoyed.
From the 18th century "enlightenment" period, you mean? Before the 18th century, this idea was pretty much absent from actual western politics. The 18th century is parted from the ancient Greek golden period by more than two thousand years.
Yes, ancient Greek philosophy was influential, but as fsloth says above, you can't just ignore the in-between time and its thinkers. Don't forget either that many of the advances in the Enlightenment came from breaking with the teachings of classical Greece.
It's the same reason Liberals might call Conservatives 'barbarians' or France might call Germany 'barbarians'.
I.E. The Greeks saw themselves as superior, culturally.
But the Romans were not actually barbarians.
The Germans were actually barbarians.
That sounds very interesting. Are there any sources that discuss this in more detail? All the results on google seem to suggest that if at all a correlation exists, that Indian philosophy might have inspired Greek Philosophy.
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/did-ancient-greece-borrow-...
http://www.josephwaligore.com/greek-philosophy/indian-influe...
https://francoisgautier.me/tag/influence-of-india-on-greek-p...
https://www.quora.com/Who-were-the-ancient-Indians-influence...
There's a story about Greek children running up to look at Greek soldiers landing on Lemnos during the First Balkan War in 1912 (Hellenes refers to Greeks)[1]:
Some of the children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. "What are you looking at?" one of them asked.
"At Hellenes," the children replied.
"Are you not Hellenes yourselves?" a soldier retorted.
"No, we are Romans."
[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=iWs0Lh57NvwC&pg=PA42&lpg=P...
We have at least three words to refer to ourselves as a nation:
"Hellenes" is the one most commonly used in modern parlance. I'm not sure where it comes from but you could google it.
"Graikoi" I believe is from the same root as "Greek". You find it in literature from the 19th century and earlier.
"Romioi" is a rendition of "Romans" and you find it very often in accounts from the Epanastasis, the uprising against the Ottoman Empire in 1821. It's used by mainland Greeks and also by the Albanian people who had moved into Greece under the Ottomans, and then fought to expel the Ottomans alongside the Greeks, and finally are today considered Greeks (primarily because it would be madness to try to untangle one's heritage, after a few hundreds of years of intermarriage).
"Romioi" is not in common usage today, except in literature or generally as a colourful turn of phrase. I believe it was bequeathed to us from the Byzantine Empire, a.k.a. the Eastern Roman Empire, as others have noted.
Is this a joke?
The First Recorded Case of Inflammatory Mastisitis - Queen Atossa of Persia and the Physicial Democedes https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1034507/
I can't find the source now, but it's known that antibiotics derived from molds such as penicillin have been in use for a very long time.
So one healer may provide you with an effective concoction of antibiotic compounds, but the next may treat with with leeches and give you some herbal tea.
Amputations.
What else?
Later on bladder stone removals ... child birth ... setting broken bones.
Even today, if you have something wrong the doctor gives you the 'wonder cure' penicillin.
Capitalist societies are relatively new. The nobility might have access to a healer, but that healer may be practicing some religious mumbo jumbo. Middle age kings would get a bleeding from a leech and a dose of Jesus.
In China, you'd get traditional medicine that has some legit use cases, but lots of bullshit as well.
As for ancient Egyptian medicine: While the bulk of Egyptian remedies can now be recognized as incapable of providing a cure, and in many circumstances even alleviation of symptoms, owing to their lack of active ingredients, it would be inappropriate to label all of these treatments as placebos. Of the 260 prescriptions in the Hearst Papyrus, 28 percent contain an ingredient which can be perceived to have had activity towards the condition being treated. More here: http://www.ucalgary.ca/uofc/Others/HOM/Dayspapers2001.pdf#pa...
I'm sorry but I've to call bullshit on this. The accepted term is that the Greeks and the Indians influenced each other. If you read the account of Pyrrho, who traveled with Alexander, he was clearly influenced by the naked gymnosophists. Take a look at this SO answer[1] discussing how Indian thought influenced Greek thoughts. On the other hand Graeco-Buddhism is an apt example of how Greeks influenced Indians. So I would rather call it a meeting of two equals, instead of this eurocentric approach of one way influence.
[1] http://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/2801/is-there-ev...
Indian philosophy may eventually have equalled Greek philosophy in many respects. But in the Hellenistic period? What would you stack up against Aristotle? Plato?
"So why, then, would I write such an anti-Roman article? Because I’m trying to give people who’ve received a eurocentric education a different set of goggles to try on: the lenses of Roma’s Asian contemporaries, some of whom genuinely did believe the Romans were “primitive” and “unclean.” This is a perspective we almost never hear about in the West, and I think it’s an interesting one to ponder. I do my best to keep my facts straight — but all the historical stories I write are colored heavily by my own interpretations and blind spots. My favorite history writers are Will Durant and Pierre Briant. I realize that this kind of “interpretive” historical writing is now considered obsolete — maybe even dangerously slanted and over-simplistic — but it’s the stuff I enjoy reading, so it’s what I write."
> slanted and over-simplistic
"Dear White People, Since You Are Racist, So Here's How You Ought To Think About This Subject" kind of thing.
I think you should re-read the paragraph you're re-stating -- you don't seem to have understood the author's meaning, because you're replying to a straw man.
In fact, IMO, almost all of the comments here seem to have missed the actual point of the article, which I don't think was at all intended to be taken on face value...
Giving people "a different set of goggles to try on" is about as far as you can get from "inflict[ing] an ideology". The entire purpose of the former is to explicitly recognize the contingency of a particular (or even any particular) ideology.
> making bigoted assumptions about their perception of the world
I don't think the assumption that most formal education in the west is pretty Eurocentric is anything less than accurate. E.g. look at the amount of time spent on various cultures in history courses and look at how they are discussed (in their own terms vs. comparatively.)
There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that, either, because it's easier to learn about things that are familiar to you, and easier to learn about new things when they are compared to things you're already familiar with. However, it does motivate the need for popular writing that points out the ways in which such an education can lead you astray.
In that respect, all of the strongly negative reactions to this article were exactly the point the author was making. The flaws in Asia-centric thinking are obvious to us, and the step that the author is hoping an educated reader will be able to make on their own (perhaps with the help of a footnote) is to realize that these same flaws are also manifest in Euro-centric thinking. (Or, you know, just get pissed off and miss the point.)
I have a lot of interest in learning about historical issues that are not necessarily commonplace 'in the West' but zero interest in learning it from armchair hacks who 'spin' ideas and misrepresent facts.
"all of the strongly negative reactions to this article were exactly the point the author was making." - no - this is false. The 'strong reactions' were against his misrepresentations and 'spin' - underlying his bigoted assumption about Westerners perspectives and biases - not about the content itself. Medium readers in particular would be fond of reading up a bit on Asian antiquity.
Yes. Should we diverge into a discussion of whether that's factually accurate?
I don't even have a nuanced understanding of the perception of modern American culture vis-a-vis most modern European cultures, and I only know that because I've spent enough time living in Europe to realize how nuanced those perceptions often are.
So, I know for a fact that I don't have a anywhere close to an accurate understanding of Western cultures vis-a-vis Asia cultures, past or present. Anyone who thinks they do and hasn't spent a good half decade in Asia is probably deluding themselves.
> and admittedly and deliberately applied 'spin' - which is wrong
The "spin" here is a rhetorical device, not an actual attempt at deceit. The fact that some people have been deceived is a reflection on their careless reading, not on the author's intent.
If the actual point of the article was to rag on Rome or the West and cheer on Asian cultures, then it would be spin in the sense of deceit, and therefore wrong.
But, as I've pointed out multiple times here, the point of his article is NOT to convince you that Asian cultures were superior to Rome. That argument is only made in order to drive home a different point -- namely, that (actual) spin exists in common understandings of Asian culture vis-a-vis Roman culture. And more generally, of X culture vis-a-vis Y culture.
> no - this is false
I'll let you read through the comments here on your own. Plenty of people are complaining about historical inaccuracies and on-face bad arguments, which are very likely there on purpose.
So, that may not be your objection, but it's just an objective, observable fact that the majority of the posts in this HN thread are discussing the relative merits of the author's historical claims (surely we can agree that it's silly to spend time pointing out the existence of flaws in an INTENTIONALLY flawed argument, right?)
> underlying his bigoted assumption about Westerners perspectives and biases
Again, it's not even remotely bigoted to assume people who grew up in one culture don't understand the perspectives of other cultures.
It's just a fact that it's really difficult to understand the variety of ways in which members of one culture perceive another culture. Even after living within a culture for several years it can be really hard to get an accurate mental model of these perspectives. And this is even true about subcultures within a rather homogeneous culture, as we see here with your accusation of "spin" or in various discussions about management from the perspective of engineers (and vice versa).
Recognizing the danger of being blinded by one's cultural predispositions is a useful recognition. It helps you communicate across cultures, whether that means talking with people from different parts of the world or from different parts of the office building. It also helps you avoid making stupid decisions supported by patently bad arguments based only upon bias inherent to your culture (whether that's the culture of a corner office or a corner of the globe).
The point of the article was the obviate this by presenting an argument that is really unconvincing and hoping the reader will do the tiny bit of work that's required to notice that the same sorts of arguments are widely accepted all the time, all over the world, and in all subcultures. The fact that the subject is western vs. eastern cultures during the Roman empire, and that the likely audience comes from a western culture, is really entirely beside the point -- it's the hook/gimmick, not the thesis.
Part of reading is understand the author's intent.
The purpose of this piece was not to document historical fact, and the author explained as much in simple and up-front language. So if you're trying to "learn about historical issues" from this, aside from issues of historiography, that's your failure as a reader.
'The Asian continent' is not a nation, and as a bonus, it also includes Rome. How much does it include Rome? Well, the last thousand-odd years of Rome's run were basically in Asia (who we call the Byzantines, they called themselves Romans).
It's also weird to proclaim 'cultural diversity' as a symbol of power in that period, when it was those who could spread their core culture that were the most powerful. Weirdly, the article later expounds on the cultural homogeneity of the Chinese as their strength. So Rome is weak because of lack of cultural diversity, and China is strong because of lack of cultural diversity?
Ultimately the article doesn't even discuss what it suggests in the title - it expounds upon those wonderous exotic peoples, and then sadly shakes its head on how two travelers must have felt dying in the 'backwater' of the Roman empire (of course, we'll neatly ignore that they were also found in a Roman backwater to begin with - Britannia wasn't exactly paved with marble). No real discussion on the meeting of the cultures.
China's historical culture and power is often overlooked by us westerners, sure, but the article is too much "gosh, those exotics!" for me.
Beyond the factual errors, there are numerous unsubstantiated claims. I don't know how one would come up with an objective way to measure philosophy and poetry. How much philosophy and poetry from (for example) the Kushan Empire has survived? What's the background for the claim that its philosophy and poetry dwarfed the Roman Empire's?
The idea that we should pay more attention to many of the other polities in history is a valid one. But I don't think an article filled with errors and baseless claims is terribly useful.
I guess he forgot the greeks and hellenization. Oh but the greeks were barbarians too.
The tone also angered me.
Greece became pretty much part of Rome.
I Read the article and I understand that it's flawed in some parts. However, that's exactly how the non-western major world civilisations are called. Barbarians, mysticals and unscientific etc are the words used to describe them. I would urge you to look past the eurocenticism as I did and you'll discover that there's truth in the facts.
If we leave out the mislabeling of images, the fact remains that the eastern world was in fact more connected, advanced and globalised compared to Rome.
"Barbarian" though is a Greek word, used by Greeks to describe anyone speaking a language that wasn't the Greek language. I'm guessing the article either ignores this or uses "barbarian" as a translation of a similar term used in the Far Eastern world, and which I don't know. I'm pretty sure there must have been one.
Of course, those two things don't have to go together. It's perfectly reasonable to understand something and deem it inferior. And deeming it inferior isn't necessarily an indication that something isn't understood.
The "Barbarians" we learn in school are exactly from Europe, not from Asia and the term is directed towards the German tribes and the Nordic ones.
Everyone called everyone else 'Barbarian' - that does not mean they were.
The Germanic tribes at the time were objectively, probably 'Barbarians' ... that's roughly objective.
But not the rest.
Medium is a 'cultural marxism' type website, they are 'non self aware social prog' type people there.
Some good stuff that goes of the hinges sometime.
The article claims that China dwarfed Rome, but the course actually claims that Rome and China under the Han dynasty were about equal in many ways (geographic size and population). There are several lectures comparing the two.
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/history-of-the-ancien...
(emphasis mine, obscuring emphasis present in original)
This doesn't inspire much confidence. I can't read it except as trying to suggest that the english word "kung fu" (modern chinese: 功夫 gongfu, meaning skill, labor, or martial arts) is derived from the name of Confucius (modern Chinese: 孔夫子 kong fuzi, meaning, as advertised, "master Kong"). I am not aware of any support for that claim -- you'll note that the "kung" of "kung fu" is the character 功, and the "k'ung" of k'ung fu-tsu, Confucius, is 孔. There was (and of course still is) a word for Confucian philosophy: it is 儒 ru, not "kung fu".
https://np.reddit.com/r/CIWO/comments/3o2y7u/kung_fu_came_fr...
Confucianism/Confucius was more of a target of jokes for daoists.
I think you mean "it is overstating to claim Rome was a dim backwater".
I had to stop reading because I felt something weird in it. Maybe too much hyperbole. Or the non academic sources. But it did make me want to broaden my knowledge of history outside the western nationalized scope we're fed.
Lots of arguments are a pretty big stretch in this article.
In particular, China was home to a huge, advanced, and highly active culture. I'm only slowly becoming aware of this myself through recent reading. As I've just commented, I only discovered in the past year the work of British biochemist-turned-sinologist Joseph Needham. His Science and Civilisation in China, proposed as a brief 5-6 volume work in the early 1950s, continues to be developed to this day. Just reading the titles of the 24 completed volumes gives a sense of the scope of invention and discovery covered. There are at least two more volumes forthcoming.
http://www.nri.cam.ac.uk/science.html
Simon Winchester's The Man who Loved China gives the background for this story, and is highly recommended.
Again: while the particulars here are distorted, the underlying truth isn't: there was a phenomenal civilisation in China during the time of the Roman empire, and it easily rivalled, and quite possibly surpassed, Rome.
I didn't read very far past this. I am under the impression that Rome was pretty technologically sophisticated, even beyond what we normally picture. Does the author go on to compare tech sophistication with examples?
Such a claim is probably false, given that China historically lagged the Mediterranean in terms of adopting technologies like swords, iron-age weaponry, chariotry, Greek fire. The main exception to this rule (gunpowder) isn't really an exception, since the development of weapons that made effective use of gunpowder (namely, the arquebus) did not occur in China but in Western Europe.
The author also conveniently ignores that many of the large European powers tried to claim the right to be the successor to the Roman Empire--the Ottoman Empire, the Byzantine Empire (which always called themselves the Roman Empire), the Russian Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire. And the fact that Latin and Greek was the mark of learned scholars, that classical works like Aristotle and Euclid were the textbooks of learning, all the way through the 1800s is a pretty clear parallel to the way that Confucius' teachings were considered the mark of proper learning in China. It can be argued that viewing Chinese history through the lens of the Mandate of Heaven hurts understanding, not helps, since it downplays the (sometimes significant) periods of disunity in China.
Rome fought with Persia to the East, the Gauls and Vandals to the north, and Carthage to the south, as well as the colonised peoples of its own empire, pretty much constantly. As I understand history, China was buffered by land (north, west, and south), and sea (west) from any significant challengers. Most of its threats were internal, the notable exception being the Mongol invasions, but that wasn't until the 1200s BCE.
On the other hand, what China did have in absolute spades and wheelbarrows full was technology (including, for the record, wheelbarrows). I've only learnt of the major study of this myself in the past year, British biochemist Joseph Needham's absolutely epic Science and Civilisation in China. Needham conceived of the work whilst in China on behalf of the British government during WWII, and proposed a 5-6 volume treatment in the 1950s. Seven decades later the work continues, with the total volume count approaching 30. Author Simon Winchester tells the story of Needham in The Man who Loved China (a single volume, should you fear to ask -- not a foregone conclusion as several digests of S&CIC run to multiple volumes themselves).
The breadth, scope, and precociousness of China's explorations in science, maths, and technology are staggering. The volume listing of the work itself gives some sense of the scope and scale, this is given at Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_...
Scientific thought. Maths, astronomy, & geology. Physics. Mechanical engineering. Civil and nautical engineering. Paper and printing. Spagyrical discovery (alchemy and immortality). Military technology. Textiles. Ferrous metallurgy. Ceramics. Mining. Botany. Agriculture. Agroindustry & Forestry. Biology & botany. Fermentation & food science. Medicine. Language and logic. Two volumes, topics unspecified, are given as "work in progress", I suspect these would concern military and weaving technologies respectively.
It's worth first pointing out that the timeline of that series is slightly misleading; for proper comparisons, you're not comparing the Han dynasty against Rome but rather the various Chinese dynasties against Western tradition from ancient Greece and Rome, through the Islamic and medieval worlds up to perhaps the end of the Early Modern, which does reduce some of the impressiveness of the achievements. It's also interesting to look at what the Chinese don't invent--they invented gunpowder, but neither corned gunpowder nor the arquebus; they never appear to have been much interested in geodesy or cottoned on to the idea of the spherical Earth; they developed printing, movable type, and paper but never developed the printing press nor the literary industry of Western Europe.
Whilst yes, there are multiple Chinese dynasties being considered here, there's pretty much a single cultural tradition, as opposed to the equivalent period of Western history which spans Egypt, the Phoenecians (or Phillistines, from which Palistine comes from), Minoans, Greeks, Macedonians, and Romans, as well as the Persian, Syrian, and several other cultures from what's now considered the Middle East.
The whole quesition of why China's progress stopped where, when, and how it did is a fascinating one. It's actually what Joseph Needham was getting at, and is termed "the Needham Question". It's strongly related to the parallel question: why did the Industrial Revolution emerge in 19th century England, and not elsewhere, or earlier, or later? I've been exploring that and could venture some suggestions.
In aaddition to Needham, there are Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation), Kenneth Boulding (The Meaning of the Twentieth Century), Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel) and many of the titles in the series the Princeton economic history of the world (http://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=hotseries&q=se%3A"Princeto...).
Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History explores the question somewhat, though I'd suggest mining the excellent bibliography for further reading (I've got a scanned copy that's not handy for extracting refs at the moment). http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/3...
I can see a few influences, some of which are pretty well developed by others, some perhaps not. Geography, politics, trade, uniformity, writing system, philosophy and theology, population, and environment all quite probably play significant roles.
The European navies very quickly in the Early Modern period became unassailable by any other naval power in the world. The most important innovation seems to be a reliable means of placing cannons on ships, including trading vessels, although the introduction of that lateen sail did greatly expand the sailing opportunities compared to square rigging (it allows you to attain decent speeds traveling into the wind, something you can't do on a junk).
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From what I learned in school and remember off the top of my head:
- Rome was an ugly place, but they kind of knew it hence upper classes went Greek and the eastern empire became more prominent. Romans were great for trade, but their empire could only be held together by growth (plunder) and that's not sustainable
- Greeks were more civilized, but clearly sucked at empire building (Alexander is Macedon). Hellenization shows that even if he messed up Persia, the culture was influential.
- China couldn't really expand because it is so isolated geographically, so it is harder to for it to influence other places. But this had an effect that arguably they were less interested in conquest and influence (outside of uniting accessible areas) - Confucianism raggin' on merchants, artisans, and whatever else might form a middle class - Ming treasure fleet might have reached Africa, but no fucks given.
- Mesopotamia did do great things back in the day, but by 1000 was past its peak (as was the Levant). Interesting how ethnic identity, especially among Semitic groups, seems quiet fluid, though invading armies + Islam explains a lot of that.
- Persions were not at all taught (before college). Seriously wtf, we covered everybody else said to be skipped in American education. But I later learned in college that perhaps they were more rural/feudal than eastern Mediterranean, (the article says more Urban than Rome, but then makes a bunch of medieval comparisons, so who knows?)
- While we didn't cover it. I read about Kush/Bactria on Wikipedia (and the other Kush hah (south of Egypt not what you were thinking hah)). I can kind of understand that as an influenCED rather than influencING kingdom it was easy to gloss over (oh we talked about the silk road, but usually in the abstract). But I do like covering it as concrete evidence that those things which were said to be influential actually were.
Basically, even in fairly leftist history curricula, it was all about who does the most trade, most urbanization, and most interaction with neighbors. Any overly courtly civilization was suspect.
Arguably then the same things that made China so dominant early on and steady thereafter also lead to its eventual falling behind. Central Eurasia might have become the dominant world culture except the Europeans got a huge steroid injection with easiest access a humongous place you could depopulate by coughing.
==========
Author asked in a caption about better timelines. I inherited some company's Hammond's "Graphic History of Mankind" from the 1950s. Some things there should definitely be revised (though they kept on extending and publishing the timeline until at least 2000) but the concept is great.
Somebody should make some crazy SVG thing where as you zoom in more details would appear. Make it procedural generated and open source so non-technical history buffs can send you PRs (or figure out how to scrape Wikipedia). I'll be forever grateful.
That was the entire point of the article. Read in particular the last few paragraphs, noting the wink-and-nod tone...
Maybe no more togas, but isn't this basically true? While for example Spanish is Basquified and French is Germanicified, modern Italian is basically the direct descendant of classical Latin just as Mandarin is a direct descendant of classical Chinese.
The two broad categories are high Latin and low Latin. Put another way, classical Latin and vulgar Latin. Low Latin was the vernacular and already used by most by 270 AD, including poets, who greatly influenced the formation and unification of the new Latin language. The "Latin" that is generally studied at university these days comes from a mediaeval Latin that is a simplification of this old, vernacular form.
Actually, during the period of classical Latin, the vulgar form already existed and broke off into at least a dozen dialects, some of which include old forms of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and, of course Latin, of which there were many versions. It was a fight between the two, but nobody really used classical Latin in everyday speech. These days, there are I want to say probably a dozen dialects in Italy. But Italian is a simplification of Roman Latin with minor influences by other Romance languages and even less influences by other world languages such as Arabic.
My basic conclusion to what you say is, there is no way you can understand classical Latin if you speak modern Italian.
> The "Latin" that is generally studied at university these days comes from a mediaeval Latin that is a simplification of this old, vernacular form.
This is certainly not the case in the US. That sounds more like studying church Latin, which will be mocked if you're studying Latin outside an explicit religious context. Where are you?
This is true.
> Any educated modern Chinese can read and understand ancient Chinese text.
This is false. Try them on something they haven't seen before.
Furthermore, just as modern Chinese who have studied ancient Chinese can read it, modern Italians who have studied Latin can read that, too. In fact, modern Italians who have studied ancient Chinese can even read that! That doesn't mean their knowledge of Italian is helpful; it isn't.
However, I have first hand knowledge that modern educated Chinese can read ancient Chinese text, which by definition means reading text they have not seen before.
The Chinese writing system changed very little since Han dynasty. Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings.
( http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 ) and also a detailed answer from an otherwise-anonymous stackoverflow user: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chines...
The way the classic Chinese was written has always been different from everyday vernacular Chinese. This has been true for every generation of Chinese learners since ancient times.
How people spoke Chinese have changed over the years dramatically. I don't think the ancient ways of speaking Chinese is understandable by modern Chinese. However, the way the language is written in formal setting has changed little up to the end of Qing dynasty in 1912.
An education in Chinese means to learn how to read these traditional Chinese writings. This education is still enforced today in modern China, hence my claim that an educated modern Chinese person can still read them and understand them. For example, a part of the Chinese college entrance exam requires the students to read an unseen piece of traditional Chinese text, and answer questions about it. During the exam, some enterprising students could even write their essays entirely in classic Chinese, garnering wide circulations on the internet.
There's a serious conflict here with your simultaneous claim that college graduates aren't yet "educated".
Granted, there are always students for one reason or another claimed that they have leaned nothing from school. It's either a false claim, or if that's true, calling them educated would be a stretch, isn't it?
Regardless, please note that of the 9 students, 2 were from China and a third was from Hong Kong.
The first answer said exactly the same thing as I said: the understanding of classic Chinese is part of the modern Chinese education, and is enforced by the state administrated college entrance exam, which is arguably the most important thing in determining a pupil's life prospect.
- You might be confusing the ability to pronounce a sentence with the ability to understand the meaning of a sentence. As here, in "Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings." This confuses "traditional Chinese", the spelling system from before 1950, with Middle Chinese, the language Wang Anshi wrote in. It is much like saying that the Romans didn't have difficulty reading Greek because their alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet. It happens that Wang Anshi wrote using traditional character forms; that is unrelated to his language. For another example, the opening couplet from Jabberwocky is in faux English:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe
- You might be suffering from a cognitive illusion.
- You might feel compelled to defend this viewpoint out of some misplaced ethnic pride.
Regardless, I can safely say that your viewpoint here is so much 费话, and your "firsthand knowledge" is either a lie or stunningly nonrepresentative. Though the topic has come up many times, no Chinese person of my acquaintance (and they tend to come from 复旦大学) has ever claimed that the Chinese of today can understand Old Chinese without extensive training in the field, much more than the educational system provides by default. They all admit, without feeling any shame, that Old Chinese is totally unintelligible to them and everyone else. You might even be the first Chinese person I've seen making this claim from the safety of the internet -- the claim is common, but generally it comes from whites who are blindly repeating what they heard somewhere.
What you do not seem to understand, is that the classic written Chinese had always been different from vernacular Chinese. This was true even for ancient times, because the classic written Chinese is NOT a record of spoken language, but a literary form, whose mastering is a prerequisite towards ascending into the aristocracy class in China.
My grandmother could read and write it fluently, but that's because in her day a good amount of correspondence was still written in Classical Chinese.
> Of course reading classic Chinese requires extensive training, that's what their middle and high school educations are for
I highly doubt your claim that your average Chinese HS graduate can read or write ancient or Classical Chinese, given that there's not much incentive to acquire that skill. I doubt even 5% of Chinese college graduates can do it.
We still teach Latin in the US, but hardly anyone graduates high school with the actual ability to read and write in Latin. I spent 6 years between middle and high school learning French, but I certainly wasn't proficient enough to even read a newspaper, even though I studied hard and got good grades in it.
I just asked my wife, who was in China until high school, and she says she doesn't know a single person who can read Classical Chinese, despite having many college-educated friends in China.
Writing classic Chinese is a completely different matter. It is considered an impressive feat, which some high school students exploit to achieve publicity for themselves and to get full score in the exam. Examples are just a google search away: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%96%87%E8%A8%80%E6%96%87%...
If your wife had undergone the same pressure to pass the all important college entrance exam, like I had many years ago, she would have learned to read classic Chinese, like I have.
My wife had already read 资治通鉴 when she was in high school. She is a special case though because she scored the first in her province's college entrance exam. I was far worse than her as I was not even among the first five in my high school, but now I read classic Chinese for pleasure, just like many other educated Chinese men would do when they get older.
> I was not even among the first five in my high school
By your own admission, both you and your wife are exceptional. If your HS class had 150 people in it, you're still in the top 5%. You are by definition part of an academic elite. You both have the motivation, time, and skill to appreciate classical Chinese literature, but you're improperly generalizing to the general population.
What about the other ~100k+ people who took the provincial exam that year, who scored much worse on that section? Or do you just tautologically consider them all uneducated people, because they failed to acquire a working knowledge of classical literature?
There are plenty of topics on the college entrance exam that people temporarily acquire some level of proficiency in to pass, but how many people actually retain it once they're working? For example, calculus is (generally) required for college applicants, but I'm willing to bet that 80%+ of college graduates are not able to do basic integrals and derivatives on the spot without access to reference materials.
Hence the general skepticism about your claim that educated Chinese people can read classical Chinese to any reasonable level of proficiency, if we define 'educated' as 'has a degree'.
The ability to read classic Chinese is not comparable with doing Calculus. The former is a language, the latter is math.
In particular, the basic vocabulary of classic Chinese is more or less the same as vernacular Chinese. The differences are the syntax and usage, which once acquired, would not be forgotten.
I think most people in this thread assumed 'educated' just means high school and college-educated, which is why everyone is disagreeing with you so vehemently. Since most people have at least a high school education, that's clearly not sufficient to be 'educated'.
It seems your definition of 'educated Chinese' is basically tautological and prescriptive -- a Chinese person can't be considered truly educated until they have gained the ability to read the classics. I would hazard that only a tiny fraction of secondary school graduates each year would be truly 'educated', under your definition.
While that's a view that is consistent with thousands of years of Confucian tradition, it might be helpful to state your assumptions and definitions up front next time.
For example, someone has just gone through the motion of schools and learned nothing, he may even be functionally illiterate (as 19% high school graduates in the US do, http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/32-million-us-adults...) by your assumed Western definition, that person is "educated". However, any Chinese would disagree with that.
So it's just a matter of opinion. Mine just has more commonsense: "If you really learned what schools taught you, you can call yourself educated, otherwise, you are not."
The situation is not really helped by western linguists trying to force shape chinese to fit their own notions and many chinese people just following along with whatever the west came up with due to the prevalence of western cultural standards.
I hate to be so contrarian, and I'm beginning to question people's knowledge in this thread, but I was taught Middle English and they hammered home how it was very close to modern English.
Yes, a lot of students were first shocked and disagreed, but if you stuck with it, you would see a lot of similarities. One thing that I think threw off a lot of students was the spelling versus the pronunciation.
If you analyze Middle English on a purely visual or "literal" level, it looks almost nothing like English. Once you start learning the pronunciation and liaisons and connecting words, and with a few minor pronunciation differences, you really do begin to hear its strong correlations to modern English.
We teach students modern versions of really old stories like gilgamesh and enkidu, but not in their original format.
Ancient Chinese - first of all seal script would make it a bit harder vs modern script but AFAIK everyone uses modern typography. Then the characters used in the old texts are often pretty different to modern ones, requiring a certain amount of study to interpret.
But most importantly the language itself would be entirely unintelligible to a modern Mandarin speaker. There are hundreds of dialects with varying levels of intelligibility with Mandarin within China, and the ancient Chinese languages were very, very different to Mandarin (some dialects are supposed to have certain similarities with it). So even if it were written phonetically and not logographically, it would be impossible to understand. More like studying Latin than Middle English.
However, an educated Chinese person is expected to be able to read classic Chinese. Not many years ago, they are even expected to be able to write in classic Chinese. For example, some top communist revolutionary leaders, such as Mao, could write beautiful classic Chinese proses, which was part of their allure to the intellectual class that supported them.
I studied Latin in Canada. Foundation Latin classes are based on the "Latin of Cicero," the writer who is considered to have mastered the language during its Golden Age by most scholars. We are not taught Classical Latin til more advanced courses, as the declensions and conjugations change and so do many word meanings, and instead of learning Classical Latin the language, we learn to close-read Classical Latin literature.
Pre-Cicero, you have Old Latin, which I agree is generally not taught.
Since we are quoting Wikipedia:
"The concepts and vocabulary from which vulgare latinum descend were known in the classical period and are to be found amply represented in the unabridged Latin dictionary, starting in the late Roman republic. Marcus Tullius Cicero, a prolific writer, whose works have survived in large quantity, and who serves as a standard of Latin, and his contemporaries in addition to recognizing the lingua Latina also knew varieties of "speech" under the name sermo. Latin could be sermo Latinus, but in addition was a variety known as sermo vulgaris, sermo vulgi, sermo plebeius and sermo quotidianus. These modifiers inform post-classical readers that a conversational Latin existed, which was used by the masses (vulgus) in daily speaking (quotidianus) and was perceived as lower-class (plebeius)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin
Wiki:
"Philological analysis of Archaic Latin works, such as those of Plautus, which contain snippets of everyday speech, indicates that a spoken language, Vulgar Latin (sermo vulgi ("the speech of the masses") by Cicero), existed at the same time as the literate Classical Latin. The informal language was rarely written, so philologists have been left with only individual words and phrases cited by classical authors and those found as graffiti."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin
Wiki:
"The written Latin of today, as used for Church purposes, does not differ radically from classical Latin. Study of the language of Cicero and Virgil suffices adequately for understanding Church Latin."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin#Compariso...
And finally, to quote what I quoted another user in this thread:
"But you are right, Cicero is Classical Latin. However, we were taught a mix of Latin that is kind of like what this Wiki says:
'The Latin of the panegyrics is that of a Golden Age Latin base, derived from an education heavy on Cicero, mixed with a large number of Silver Age usages and a small number of Late and Vulgar terms.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panegyrici_Latini#Language_and...
'Silver Age' is what I probably should have said instead of strictly Late and Vulgar, which are both technically different terms, but which were also taught in my Latin courses."
My experience of "the written Latin of today" in terms of European scholarship is that, while it is recognizably Latin, it is much easier for me to understand than Latin written by Romans is. This is not surprising, as it is a foreign language to the authors and their world is closer to mine than classical Rome is. I have very little experience with church Latin, but I've assumed it is more similar to scholastic Latin than it is to classical Latin, since, like scholastic Latin, it is a foreign language to the speakers and fills basically the same social role.
Unfortunately, I do not have time to explain everything, and I am also not a Latin scholar. I studied Latin over 6 years ago so my Latin history knowledge is also a little fuzzy.
But you are right, Cicero is Classical Latin. However, we were taught a mix of Latin that is kind of like what this Wiki says:
"The Latin of the panegyrics is that of a Golden Age Latin base, derived from an education heavy on Cicero, mixed with a large number of Silver Age usages and a small number of Late and Vulgar terms."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panegyrici_Latini#Language_and...
"Silver Age" is what I probably should have said instead of strictly Late and Vulgar, which are both technically different terms, but which were also taught in my Latin courses.
As someone who knows a little latin, spanish and french, I think with a little bit of thought, you can get a decent gloss of quite a bit of classical latin. I'd say it's probably easier to guess at latin than trying to understand italian if you only know spanish.
For example -- the first line of Caesar's commentaries:
"Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres"
"All of Gaul is divided in three parts"
Spanish (using google translate, because i'm lazy, but you get the idea): 'Toda la Galia está dividida en tres partes' French: Tout de la Gaule est divisée en trois parties Italian: Tutto della Gallia è divisa in tre parti
I don't mean to brag, but I speak fluent Spanish, and I studied Italian, French, and Latin for four years. I never studied Portuguese, but I can read probably 50% of it and grasp about 70% of its meaning. Romanian looks a lot more like Latin, so I used to be able to spot some words in it, as well. My Latin is rusty these days, though.
The difference between Classical Latin is that word meaning is very different, even though it looks similar. You can't go from a modern Romance language and back, but you can go from Classical/Vernacular Latin forward.
Even Latin speakers would sometimes get confused which words were accusative and nominative cases in complex sentence structures. The easiest ones are genitive, ablative, and dative, but try reading literature that is long, and it starts getting complicated to parse who is doing the action to what.
Not to mention the noun declensions, which are completely nonexistent in all modern Romance languages.
In translation class, we were taught about false friends, so this added to my paranoia probably.
Modern written Mandarin was standardized based on Northern vernacular Chinese dialects in early last century, which had diverged very far from the Classical Chinese of the Qing and Han dynasties (when the vernacular of the time was recorded and standardized).
Without specifically being taught, Classical Chinese is mostly incomprehensible to a native Mandarin speaker -- the vocabulary has changed a lot and the grammar has shifted. To make things more difficult, because the sound system in Mandarin underwent simplification, many words that used to be differentiated are now homophones.
Written Classical Chinese is also not readable without specific teaching -- even when characters are the same, the meaning has often diverged significantly. False cognates abound.
To further the analogy, the regional Chinese 'dialects' like Cantonese, Fuzhounese, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, etc. are for the most part mutually incomprehensible, having developed their own sound systems, vocabulary, and grammar. A linguist would consider them separate languages, just like the different Romance languages.
Source: am a native Cantonese and Mandarin speaker
you are probably off by one order of magnitude.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Italy#Migra...
Unless you claim that modern French and German are also all direct descendants of Romans, I do not see the narrative that modern Italians are the direct descendants of Romans can hold water.
They cannot be both true. Take your pick.
The invading Romans did not displace the pre-existing population of Gauls in what is now modern France. The invading Franks did not displace the pre-existing population of Roman Gaul. The people who lived in France in 1600 were mostly descended from the people who lived there in 1600 BCE.
The people of modern Italy and France are descended from an ancient colonization of Western Europe. The invading populations of Goths and Lombards were able to usurp the ruling class, but genetically the invading tribes were a small population that merged with a large population.
The modern population of Italy is descended from the ancient Romans, which were descended from the more ancient Celts, just like the people of France (and to a lesser extent, Germany).
And I would associate that ancient population which colonized Western Europe with the Y-chromosome Haplogroup R1b [1].
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Now obviously this isn't the entire history. Genocides happened and displacement happened. (I even found an interesting study which found that descendents of ancient Etruscans are still around, but not on ancient Etruscan sites -- they've been displaced to nearby valleys [2]).
But on the average, it looks like the people who lived in France and Italy circa 500 BCE had a much larger genetic impact on the modern populations of France and Italy than the small invading tribes which displaced or merged with the ruling classes of those regions during the fall of the Roman Empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1b#R1b1a1a2_.28R-M...
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
1. It is inconsistent with historical records. There's no evidence showing that the ancient Gauls, Celts and so on are of the same nationality as that of Romans. Their Y DNA are unlikely the same.
2. It assumes the invading Franks, Goths, and so on have different gene from the general public that they ruled over, i.e. Goths and Franks were not R1b, but there's no evidence to that. There's no evidence that the European medieval noble class were not R1b.
3. It is inconsistent with the common phenomenon of an invading ruling class's Y DNA quickly displace the ruled ones. A recent example is south American. R1b becomes the majority in a little over 500 years, displacing the original Q DNA.
4. The timeline does not work. R1b is a new gene originated about 10000 years ago in Asia. There's no way they are the one first colonized Western Europe. People with I, G and other far older genes have been there for a long time when R1b shows up.
"But we don’t still identify as “citizens of the Roman Empire,” and we certainly aren’t ruled by emperors who derive their authority from the gods of Mt. Olympus."
Interesting because many Americans do consider themselves as the spiritual successors of the Roman empire leading to things like having american "Senators" meeting in the "Senate". Also possibly why some of the commentators here seem so put off by the article.
I'm sorry, what? I'm not an American so this is the first time I'm hearing this. Can someone recommend some reading on this topic? Seems pretty interesting.
I would not mind reading a historical novel based on it (I understand that's what the article is really a plug for). I would certainly welcome a game based on the historical periods and geographic areas covered. It's a bit sad that so many games are set in the European middle ages when there are so many more colourful periods of history to conquer or loot in (hey- you can play the Sassanids in Rome: Total War, at least; and yeah, cataphracts do tear a new one to legionnaires).
The big problem of the article however, and one that puts an obvious hole smack in the middle of its claim that "westerners were the true barbarians" is, as others have pointed out, that it avoids pretty much any discussion of the intellectual activity that went on between the shores of the Middle East and the Adriatic Sea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece
Not to mention: everything started in Babylon, and ancient Sumer, and Aegypt, but then it got carried over to the western world through the Greeks and lives on to this day.
So it's a bit silly to separate the achievements of different peoples according to geography when they obviously and clearly were smart enough to learn from each other. It's much better to speak of a human civilisation that covered the globe and survives to this day, thank the gods.
A barbarian, in the end, is just a person who can't see beyond the borders of his or her own country.
Property Law? Check. Marriage and Divorce? Check. Democracy and Public Life processes? Check.
Well it evolved of course. But hey... Republic comes from Res Publica not Kushan Whatever.
Is HN really a place for such uneducated snarky comments? The reason we use Republic and English is due to the barbaric colonization by European powers in the past.
There were democracies in Ancient East too, and if you read the laws of Ashoka/Gupta etc, you'll find they were much more advanced than most of their contemporaries. We don't need to stoop so low to discredit other cultures just because we can't overcome our bias.
The amount of self-loathing in the West is reaching critical levels.
> Property Law? check. Marriage and Divorce? check
Are you really saying that these ideas originated in Roman empire ? I think expanding your reading repertoire will help get a more informed perspective.
All I can say is that your comment does not come off as particularly knowledgeable or educated.
Like many already pointed this "article" is totally fantasious.
I feel there's a market need for a browser plugin that lets you filter out clickbait factories like his employers and all the dirty tricks they use to hijack our attention. There's no way we can keep up with them without computer assistance.
I'm assuming most people here have gotten their information off the Web and have a very one-sided view of whatever they have decided they have attained "knowledge" on.
> The "Latin" that is generally studied at university these days comes from a mediaeval Latin that is a simplification of this old, vernacular form.
You're on solid ground to say that in the classical period there were several registers of Latin, that the lower registers gave rise to vulgar and late latin, and that those gave rise to church latin. (I can only really interpret "medieval Latin" as referring to church latin.) You're certainly on solid ground to say that speaking Italian won't let you understand Latin.
But the Latin you study in a normal Latin course is the high register of the classical period, Classical Latin. It doesn't derive from medieval Latin, it predates it by many hundreds of years.