Archaeologists uncover ancient street food shop in Pompeii
reuters.com
reuters.com
2000 / 25 = ~80 generations
It's not some uncountable number with a million zeros. Assuming everyone knew one of their grandparents, it's more like 40 interpersonal "links".
I honestly feel like if Europe didn't have the Early Middle Ages (~500-1000AD), we would feel pretty connected to all the history that happened before in the same way that we feel pretty connected to Copernicus developing Heliocentrism or Columbus arriving in the New World.
I wonder whether civilizations with seemingly more continuous histories like China feel more connection to the rest of their history. India's history was sort of interrupted by Islamic invasions starting from the 1200s. The Middle East, despite its tremendously long history, experienced a significant shift in culture with the rise of Christianity and then Islam.
If Chinese people don't feel that historical connection, on the other hand, it might mean that our disconnect with ancient history might more just be a product of Modernity and the rapid change of the last couple centuries.
This is a really good point actually. I have talked recently to Persian coworkers about their nation's history. They identify with the full length of recorded Persian history. That is, all ~5000 years of it. I have read elsewhere that this is possibly a modern trend, that is, they didn't teach Persian history as the history of their current country at some points in the past.
I suspect their emotional attachment to events 2000 years ago feels a bit different to mine then. They might feel a whole lot closer to the Sassasinds than I do to Boudicca. But maybe that has not always been the case.
That 5000 number is interesting though. Do they feel a connection with the Elamites, Sumerians, and Akkadians? That would be kind of surprising. It would make sense for them to connect with Xerxes and the Achaemenids or Medians though, despite the difference in religion. Sorta related, I've heard that there's a growing Zoroastrian movement among the "rebellious" Persian youth.
It was interesting seeing flowers in the spot where Caesar was killed on the Ides of March some 2000 years later.
American parents will warn their children that if they misbehave, "the boogeyman" will come for them at night. I was told that the Middle Eastern analogue was "Richard will come and get you" — as in Richard the Lion-Hearted. (I have no idea if this is true or not… it sounded like a fun anecdote back in college, now it sounds slightly ridiculous to me, but who knows?)
Every nation has a founding myth. Romania's is the struggle against adversity, foreign empires and our resilience over millennia. The American one is freedom (the struggle against tyranny) and the American dream. The British one is resistance against adversity on their island, vanquishing European autocrats. Russia's is liberation from the steppe nomads and then turning the tides in a rough part of the world.
They're half lies, half truth in my experience. You know, myths :-)
Secondly, the Crusades happened a very long time ago. From experience, I have never met or heard of an Arab who thought it was anything but a historical event. So, I highly doubt that anyone in the Middle East thinks of the Crusades as being relatively recent.
And yes nobody literally thinks it happened yesterday, so you’re missing the point.
The challenge remains to reconnect with the past without using it to justify atrocities in the present. (For the avoidance of doubt, this is not limited to European history! China does historicist propaganda films too! As do a lot of places, right down to warring caucasian microstates)
(I would reccomend Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Time Of Gifts", which is nominally a walking tour but has an incredible connection to the history of Europe and the places he's walking through. Everything from Charlemagne to Esterházy to Roland to Homer)
If you showed that fast food place to an Italian fascist they would probably blow it up because it was low culture and glorifying consumerism.
That having been said, the study of classics being unfashionable due to fascism isn't at all true.
The rootless proletariat of Rome is oddly enough something that communists latch on to: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37811.The_Assassination_...
You should probably read what an ideology actually believes before making sweeping pronouncements for them. This is how we end up with American rednecks being called nazis and american college students communists when the first are slightly right of center market liberals and the second are slightly left of center market liberals.
You shouldn't assume that you're talking to Americans.
Judging from your comment I can assume you're not American, therefore you might be familiar with Coletti's study on the rural roots of fascism.
Have an excerpt that you might find interesting: ''' One can not say based on these figures that Fascism has become strictly rural; one can only say that a good half of the Fascist militias come from the rural areas. Not only are we not ashamed of this, but we would like to proclaim — as a badge of honour — that Fascism in the Po Valley is today largely "rural". '''
Lastly, one of the "good things that Mussolini did" (as his supporters love to repeat) is precisely the creation of agricultural land after the 1929 crisis. The n.3134 law on land quenching (legge sulla bonifica integrale) turned ONE THIRD of the land into agricultural soil (more here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Land).
You shouldn't assume other people suffer from delusions. Best regards.
Regarding delusions, I was referring to the "volkish" beliefs in German fascism.
Ridiculous. People will use anything to justify anything. The fact that some fascists pointed to Ancient Rome is almost certainly just a result of the outsized space Rome and Greece occupies in the western cultural landscape.
The challenge most certainly does not “remain”. Modern classics departments are essentially just history, language, literature, archaeology, and anthropology rolled into one, with a specific focus on the ancient Mediterranean.
And it doesn't help that at that time universities and the study of classics was basically the preserve of the upper classes, who naturally had elitist ideological biases.
There was definitely a sense among many that modernity, democracy, multiculturalism, liberalism were tied up with and responsible for the chaos in Europe at the time. And fingers were pointed at communists, socialists, Jews, liberals, secularists, etc, and in that period nationalists and ultimately fascists or other ultranationalist authoritarians were able to take root. And they often did so by appealing to their imagination of the past.
I was taught Classics at a moderately posh school. And the Roman Empire - which was a very effective nationalist war machine, but utterly barbaric ethically - was very consciously echoed by the British Empire.
It's still consciously echoed in the US. Congress has a couple of giant fasces on the wall behind the Speaker. How much more of a clue does anyone need?
This is no longer obvious in modern Classics departments, and modern Europe draws on more recent history. But it's still a very obvious motivator for imperial Anglophone militarism and commerce. Most obviously in the UK, our recent crop of neo-imperialists not only drop Latin into their speeches but seem to think of themselves as classical heroes.
Also, it's very obviously not the case that studying classics makes you imperialist. I don't doubt that some right-wingers may like to add classics into their educational program, to create a link to the past, as you say, but that is not inherent in classical studies.
I studied classics (mostly Latin and Greek) at the university level, and not only was the phenomenon to which you refer not obviously part of the teaching, it wasn't there in the first place.
In any case, the problem isn't the substance of studying Latin, or studying history of any kind for that matter. It's about people who already have right-wing views liking to use classical aesthetics.
Actually, I would say that the closest thing you have to R.E. today is the European Union, sans the military might, of course. For all the glory of the Roman legions, it is often forgotten that the Roman empire was a common market first and foremost. Without the economic ties, the empire would have been much more fragile from within.
And the EU of today resembles that ancient structure quite a bit. A huge amalgamation of a babel of nations with a shared citizenship, unification of various laws, regulations and standards so that Portuguese butter is not that different from Finnish, a lot of internal trade reaching even the most outlying extremes of the continent, a conscious building of a pan-European road network, even the original treaty establishing the European communities was signed in Rome.
Interestingly, having semi-hostile Asia Minor (Erdogan) and having almost no control over North Africa is an obvious kind of security problem for the EU, which any Roman general would immediately point out. A secure southern border would be the almost impassable Sahara, not the Mediterranean Sea.
That's a non sequitur.
"All this referencing of the ancient world" gave us the Renaissance and the Englitenment. And in tandem with the influence of christian morals, ended up giving us human rights, the respect (instead of contempt) for the powerless and the victim, and so on.
"Fascism", on the other hand, was an isolated ideology, it only really took off to a signficiant degree in Italy and Germany [1], and had nothing to do with the ancient world (although in the german version it had a fondness for paganism).
[1] While Japan was an Axis ally, theirs was just a plain-old nationalism, it had nothing to do with the ancient Greco-roman world, and also nothing to do with the economic etc. politics of Italian fascism (whereas German national-socialism had a lot in common with it). As for the rest, modern historians don't even consider Franco's Spain as fascist.
I am from Rome and live near the Colosseum, the connection with our past is very strong, especially now that we are uncovering more and more ancient relics thanks to modern archeology.
A friend of mine is a guide and we go visit the archeological sites at least once a month.
Ancient romans used to make fun of each other, regardless of the cetus
When the Roman army won some important battle the Emperor himself could be mocked for a day, to express the human nature of every Roman in contrast to the divine nature of many ruling classes of their times.
As an anecdote: Julius Caesar was bald and suffered about his condition, after a very important battle won by the Roman army he was made fun all day by his soldiers for being bald, despite being their general and one of the most important men in Rome.
They had a very peculiar relation with death, the funerary inscriptions are particularly interesting
https://exhibitions.kelsey.lsa.umich.edu/galleries/Exhibits/...
It's a tradition in Rome to joke about death, even today.
Saying to a friend "ti ammazzo" (I'm gonna kill you) it's considered normal, in Rome if you hear "mortacci tua" (to your lousy bad ancestors!) you can be sure it's two friends that met after a long time and are saluting each other.
Romans built their cemeteries outside the city walls to not pollute the urban space, except for the Monumental Cemetery of Campo Verano (simply Verano in Rome) and the Protestant Cemetery, both built in 19th century, there are no other burial sites in Rome and the city's cemetery is located 30 Kms away from the city centre.
A lot of the Roman culture has survived through the centuries, it's the base of our society after all. We still use Roman roads and aqueducts, our cities are built on Roman settlements and follow the same structure, Roman law is a course and matter of examination at law university.
My "real Roman" friends can trace back their family roots to Roman people and have Roman family names (Fabi, Crescenzi, Emiliano, Lattanzi etc.)
Also we should not forget that Christians took a lot from the Hebrew tradition (angels in the old testament were inspired to mythological Egyptian or Mesopotamian creatures) and you can find testimony of their original form here, for example this Tetramorphous as Ezekiel described it, can be found at Anagni, a small city outside Rome. AFAIK there aren't many other places in the west where you can find them.
http://www.lundici.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Cattedrale-...
So, in a way, we are more connected to our past history than ever.
My native language isn't a Romance language, but I have also spent five years learning Latin in grammar school and for me, learning both the vocabulary and the grammar was hard, hard work. I always assumed that for a native Italian speaking person it would be probably a lot easier.
In Italy if you follow classical studies you learn ancient Greek too (first 2 years of high school), which was definitely harder than latin, but you grock the alphabet in a short time. I seem to recall that more often than not the same word had very different meanings depending on the context, while the grammar was similar to latin (well, of course it's backward...).
This said, I agree that for us a bunch of things are probably easier, simply because a lot of terms map directly to modern words, so the vocabulary is fairly easy to build. We also tend to ignore any pronunciation rule - we just pronounce it phonetically using Italian rules. I understand “real” scholars actually follow different rules, and Anglo people have their own conventions. Also, there is a lot of Latin all around us in inscriptions and names etc, so if it “clicks” you can find a lot of inspiration and practice with no effort.
A better approach to Latin studies would also be interesting, I wish I studied Latin with a method like Lingua Latina per se Illustrata
Has it occurred to you that "our disconnect with ancient history" isn't as widespread as you may think?
In fact, I was rather taken aback by your assertion:
>I honestly feel like if Europe didn't have the Early Middle Ages (~500-1000AD), we would feel pretty connected to all the history that happened before in the same way that we feel pretty connected to Copernicus developing Heliocentrism or Columbus arriving in the New World.
A connection to anything requires the effort of making that connection.
And history is no exception. If someone feels disconnected from history, it's incumbent upon them to engage and connect with it.
I'd point out that for pretty much all of recorded history, it's only been those with power and wealth that have had the leisure or need to become literate, let alone to study history.
That's changed to a certain extent but most folks, even in modern times, give little thought to history, and have little interest in it.
As for "Western" culture, there's a great deal that's known and a huge amount of scholarship has and continues to be done around it and its history. If you put even a tiny bit of effort[0][1][2], you can gain great deal of knowledge about history.
Should you wish to expend more effort, there are literally thousands of books, academic papers and treatises which provide enormous insight into our history.
And if you're really interested, you can make a whole career out of the study and exposition of history.
As such, I'd say that any "disconnect" from history is rooted in a lack of interest or even a modicum of energy expended in "connecting" with it.
Our current culture and educational systems seem to deprecate and devalue history, even recent (the last 50 years or so) history. That's a shame IMHO.
Please don't take my comment as a personal attack, it's not. The sentiment you express isn't unusual or surprising.
The solution to such a "disconnect" is to access historical information and cultural narratives. Such access is, I'd argue, more available to the lay person than ever before.
I'd also note that the "disconnect" you mention, while seemingly related to mass communications and its focus on trivia and current events, isn't anything new or profound. Rather, it's related to a lack of interest among most people.
Whether that lack of interest is based on a lack of leisure time, a discouragement of such endeavors by our media and educational systems and/or other factors, it's that lack of interest that causes such a disconnect -- and that's easily remedied.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1U_8A7q8La1VfEa-HJif...
[1] https://www.edx.org/learn/western-civilization
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_decline_of_the_West
Edit: Improved clarity.
How so?
Is it your view that pointing out that effort is required to obtain knowledge is "condescension?"
Who, exactly, was I condescending to? I'd be really interested to know, since that wasn't even a consideration to me.
In fact, I even make reference to this:
>A such, please don't take my comment as a personal attack, it's not. The sentiment you express isn't unusual or surprising.
Perhaps your confusion lies in my repeated use of the pronoun "you," which in this context refers to general humanity rather than any particular person (and most certainly not OP).
It's unfortunate that you (in this case, I specifically mean the poster to whom I'm responding) chose to ignore my argument because of some invented negativity.
Thank you for sharing your point of view. I appreciate your feedback.
The central point of your original comment was that there is extensive historical information available connecting us to our past but one has to put in the effort to discover it. You provided links to support your point.
This point could have been made succinctly. Many of the sentences with italics come across as preachy even though you probably didn't intend to. They were also unnecessary to get your point across.
[0] Fall of Civilizations https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR7yrLMHm11X6-M_usCj5...
Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out.
>The central point of your original comment was that there is extensive historical information available connecting us to our past but one has to put in the effort to discover it. You provided links to support your point.
That was one point I was attempting to make. I further wanted to make it clear that such resources are more available to more people than they ever have been.
However, the central point I was attempting (apparently unsuccessfully, in your case) to make was that history is not, and never has been, all that important to most people, that our media and culture actively discourage any interest in history; and that feeling a "disconnect" from history is neither unusual nor a recent development.
Again, I appreciate your feedback, as I already know what I think and want to say, but (obviously) don't know how others will interpret what I do say.
Edit: Clarified several points.
It took several centuries for the germanic, etc. tribes that defeated Rome to become civilized enough to Roman standards, and build equal structures and quality of life.
(As a point of comparison, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, etc. had centuries of written history, whereas e.g. the British written history starts with the Roman invasion of the island, and starts by Romans).
I had a similar experience in Japan last year when I learned the same family has ruled for something like 1500 years and trace their history back 2600 years.
One of the exhibits consisted of three gold bracelets - beautiful, modern designs that would have looked at home in a window at Tiffany's. They had been excavated from strata with charcoal that dated at ~6,000 - 5,000 BC.
That single exhibit imbued in me a feeling of connection to our human past as much as has a lifetime of interest in history.
Not crazy at all. Dancing, singing, music is part of just about every human culture. I'd even say dancing is a sort of fun communal therapy. Which makes total sense why its part of ceremony.
Note, Many people such as myself claim they don't dance. But secretly I "dance" (thrash about incoherently) around the when the music is going and no one is looking.
Are there any cultures WITHOUT dancing, singing, music? I'd find that astounding!
> But secretly I "dance" (thrash about incoherently) around
Ah, one of my people :-)
Thrashing about incoherently is just a sign that you’ve lost yourself in the music, and is exactly what you’re going for.
Berghain is a meme at this point, but fuck, I’ve never experienced anything like the communal trance that happens in there.
The polish and cuts on the statues were as good if not better than some of the stuff we produced with machines and power tools, and it gave me this sense of awe and made me realize people had been doing the same thing i spent every day doing for thousands and thousands of years.
Indonedia, Turkey and Egypt are next for you if you want your mind blown; the monolithic structures there are way older and far more intricate than a cup and are going back +10,000 years: Gunung Padang, Gobekli Tepe and possibly some of the older Egyptian Pyramids if you follow modern archeological studies on time periods that depict water erosion from rain in the Nile.
Graham Hancock's work is what confirmed my innate intuition that Agriculture has to be older than the claimed ~10,000 years as it is just to complex of a technology and a Scientific discipline to not be: these monoliths are a testament of Human ingenuity as that complex level of division of labour and highly specialized engineering, infrastructure and planning are only possible because of surpluses of food and water in civilization. Everyone I know that's been there dismisses the propaganda that the pyramids were 'built by slaves' as it falls flat on its face when they see the level of intricacy and precision required to build a symmetrical pyramid with no variation its construction, its baffling to me that for all of our amazing technology we struggle to come close to this day using modern tools and equipment and probably can't make something similar from those materials. And yet there it is a monolith that stood the test of time and is only a dull glimmer of what it was in it's peak when Egypt served as the beacon for Human knowledge but also serves as a reminder of what we're capable of when we collectively apply ourselves to an endeavor that defies all possible expectations of what is/was thought to be possible. And we still haven't excavated most of what is at Gunung Padang as it goes down very deep and is only visualized through radar.
I've never been myself, but I hope to go to all 3.
https://www.west-crete.com/excursion/chania/chania-archaeolo...
Well, that's true for the western Roman Empire. The eastern side (which included southernmost Italy, Greece, most of the mediterrenean, middle east - Syria, Lebanon, and balkans, and eastern (modern) turkey) persisted, kept and advanced the Roman civic structure, organization, legal system, etc and didn't collapse during the middle ages.
That's why you find e.g. levantine people like Taleb that feel and express the whole connection of their area back to the ancient times...
Of course, the Ottomans weren’t the only ones playing this game; the Holy Roman Empire and to some extent Russia were also examples.
> For example, we don’t call it “Constantinople” any more
"THE ETYMOLOGY OF İSTANBUL: MAKING OPTIMAL USE OF THE EVIDENCE"
https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/bitstream/handle/item/15924/stac...
(It disputes the details of the traditional 'to the city' etymology, but in the end proposes deriving from something else with very similar meaning, "στην Πόλι" (something maybe like 'sten Poli' but there are details of historical pronunciation in the article I didn't read closely) rather than "εἰς τὴν Πόλιν" [is timˈbolin].)
They did, but after half to a full millenium after the fall of the Roman Empire - so for those there it was a much more "recent" (for ancient peoples sense of historical time) affair.
>For example, we don’t call it “Constantinople” any more and the inhabitants of the region don’t seem to consider themselves descendants of Romans as much as Ottomans
Funnily enough, the Mehmed II (the conquestor of Constantinople) did call himself (among other things) "king of the romans" after that.
And the name Instabul itself comes from Constantinople (also known as "Pole" (The City, it being the big Apple of the area, where Instabul meant "in-sten-Pole" (to-the-City).
But yes, the current inhabitants of modern Turkey region don’t consider themselves descendants of Romans. But you can find some connection to other parts of the mediterranean and the levant.
So did the West. We went from a Late Imperial system in which the military had the power (so-called « barbarians ») to an Early Medieval system in which the military had the power and stopped paying lip service to the Emperor. That's it. Collapse happened in very localized area (like England), but it certainly doesn't apply to Gaul, Iberia and Italy.
The big hole in the « Dark Ages » is due to the Islamic invasion of North Africa cutting off the supply of papyrus. But the papyrus left from the 6th and 7th centuries makes it extremely clear that those were literate societies keeping and iterating upon the Late Roman forms of administrations.
The low point is around the 8th c., somewhere between the Islamic invasion of Spain and Charlemagne.
But yes, we got a lot of middle eastern history; big fascinating archaeological sections in the appendix of my Bible. But of course it all ended in around 100 AD, with no mention of anything after, really. And it of course put a lot of emphasis on the land of Israel, which in the real world of the ancient near east was really a minor player surrounded by Egypt, the Hittites, Assyria, etc.
Just a waypoint on death cult checklist.
This also suggests that 50% would disagree with that, but 1 in 2 is plenty.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27467.The_End_of_Days?ac...
Shirvan is quite neutral so it's worth a watch.
It took the renaissance to change things up and for innovation and cultural progress to pick up. So, it was more than a 1000 years lost to petty warfare, destruction and general ignorance.
If the Roman Empire had endured, who knows how things would have evolved. We would have been a different civilization by now. We probably would have had colonized mars by now :)
Ps. The byzantine empire, the eastern side of the Roman empire, after the late 600s - 700s, was just a shade of its original, and kept losing territory and influence until it was just a city state conquered by the Ottomans in 1453.
Uhm, I'd say more like 378 (battle of Hadrianopolis) - 800 (Charlemagne is crowned Emperor). The idea that the whole medieval period is a "dark age" [1] is currently discredited among historians: from 800 until the Black Death of the mid-1300s, European culture and economy grew almost nonstop.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
That's old but very sticky Early Modern propaganda, mostly due to anti-Catholicism. No serious historian today would make that claim, and frankly it's complete nonsense.
Well, they're still able to read their ancient texts and probably understand them well.
Now, even Greeks would struggle with the ancient Greek texts.
When you're growing up, it seems like the older generation is so different, and the generation before that is unrecognizable. I assumed that modern day life would be absolutely foreign to someone from 2000 years ago.
Then you read the graffiti and realize, nothing has changed! https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-p...
I highly recommend seeing Herculaneum if you're ever in the area. It's very impressive to see all this up close. We really haven't changed that much.
Go even further back on the other side of that sea and our earliest cunieform tablets - earliest records of structured language - is about someone trying to amicably resolve a contractual dispute on a simple failure to deliver
I think before then we just lack records and have just put way too much weight on children doodling in caves
There is nothing linear about human advances and customs
A quality assurance dispute, no less! The customer rejected the initial delivery of copper ingots because they weren't up to his standards and the vendor kept the money. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
It's from Homer's Illiad and Odyssey where he refers to sea the color of wine. However: 1) it's possible he's referring to the darkness, not color, or some other aspect like turbulence; 2) he was also supposedly blind, so not the best judge of colors and 3) it's possible that he didn't really exist at all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms
It's a fresco of the Three Graces. From Pompeii. From the first century.
Just whip me up a timeline here of where that fits in at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Graces
If you can find a Three Graces made in a one-digit, two-digit or three-digit year, it would do a lot to change my mind.
Similarly, you might appreciate The Satyricon by Petronius. Civility of yore my ass! (Staying in theme)
Can you imagine if we could watch millions and millions of hours of romans doing mundane things? Of vikings giving cooking tips? Of ancient mesopothamians freestyling on some ancient instruments? Our vision of the past would be radically different I think. We're at the beginning of an entirely new era of human history, where future humans will be able to analyse the most mundane aspects of our existences documented thoroughly online.
I wonder how it's going to influence languages and cultures. Can you imagine following a video of a recipe recorded 700 years ago for instance? That'd be wild, yet it's probably going to become commonplace in the future.
Meanwhile I feel weird watching century old photos and videos because I can't help thinking "everybody I see here is now dead".
Funnily enough that's how a lot of ancient culture was lost in the middle ages because heresy and paganism.
Here's how the theory goes. Dark ages (a now antiquated term) aren't defined by a lack of records being created, it's defined by the lack of records making it to the modern era. That can happen one of two ways; either records aren't being created due to the fragmentation of existing states, or records are created but they either degrade or are not readable in the future.
While we are creating records at an unbelievable pace, there's an open question how long they'll be readable. Most of our data is stored on sensitive equipment that requires fairly sophisticated maintenance. So long as our society continues mostly uninterrupted, we can keep adding new data and have it for the future. And while there is some risk of future file formats being hard to read, basic images and what not should be readable forever. But it doesn't take a very long interruption to our social structure for these systems to begin to fail, and left alone for centuries most of the data storage mechanisms we use would lose all their data. Even DVDs break down in a few decades, if we went through a serious civil war or something on-par with the breakup of the roman empire, it's possible that most of the records that would survive into the next millenia might be paper records.
In fact, this already happens all the time when websites go out of business or purge data either by policy or even by accident. On top of my head: Megaupload, Geocties, Myspace, Tumblr and Fotolog have lost massive amounts of data for different reasons.
Also, I don't think most people (non-historians) will care that much about all the stuff that does survive from our time. For example, apparently we do have recipes from ancient Rome: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/233472.html
For example, we toured Pompeii in early December and it was raining lightly. We got to see the rain systems in action--2000+ year old road grading and rain capturing systems (compluvium/impluvium/subfloor cistern) working as designed.
The Romans had water fountains on every block fed by pressure from the aqueduct, and they were all marked with different figures so that you effectively had a street address even if you were illiterate.
It was also quite stunning to me that the Romans worked glass, and it was common. That's just amazing to me given the temperatures and skill involved.
And, as people noticed, the art of the time was quite good. These food stalls are decorated with quite workable figures as they had to be--common people weren't literate. And the art in the better houses was actively good. The artists had working knowledge of their medium, tools and techniques--no crappy flat faces without depth and perspective here.
We are clever monkeys in any time.
Funnily enough, one way that life 2000 years ago was familiar was that it included a lot of inter-generational moaning; we have written records of Romans complaining about the youth of today.
In black and white everything looks vintage, antiquated, slightly alien.
When they're colored you can really see the people and make an emotional attachment.
I know that the coloring process uses some artistic license, but in many cases the reproductions are based off of authentic materials, paints, etc so they're quite realistic.
I think I answered my own question with a few google searches. Seems that Romans had a taboo about eating hoursemeat. https://www.academia.edu/12021679/1999_Eating_horse_meat_the...
So I guess that picture is suppose to be a cow?
https://barrie360.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/sophie-1-1....
Also, I'm surprised by how similar the collar design looks like a typical encrusted dog collar you could find at any dog park today.
I interpreted the image to the right of it as a dog.
https://www.parool.nl/english/takeaways-aren-t-a-new-thing-t...: “takeaways and deliveries are nothing new: they were the staple diet of most people in ancient Rome.”
https://www.businessinsider.nl/fast-food-ancient-rome-histor...:
“Ancient Roman fast food joints were called “thermopolia.”
These restaurants had a bad reputation, but they provided fast and cheap meals to the poor of ancient Rome.”
The poor in Rome lived in multi-story wooden buildings where open fire cooking is not a good idea.
That second link says Pompeii had 150 thermopolia, so I guess not having a real kitchen was fairly common for the poor there, too.
So I would imagine many of the residents had disposable income for dining out.
The wealthy would have kitchen facilities in their villa, and usually the middle class in their domus, and would probably usually eat at home (as might their servants and some clients) but even then they might have lunch on the street while in town transacting business.
https://www.adnkronos.com/rf/image_size_400x300/Pub/AdnKrono...
> The Thermopolium of Regio V, one of the snack bars at Pompeii, complete with an image of a Nereid riding a sea-horse, which had previously been partially excavated in 2019, re-emerges in its entirety, with other rich decorative still lifes, food residues, animal bones and victims of the eruption.
A thermopolium [2]:
> In the ancient Greco-Roman world, a thermopolium, ...i.e. cook-shop, literally "a place where (something) hot is sold", was a commercial establishment where it was possible to purchase ready-to-eat food.
[1] http://pompeiisites.org/en/comunicati/the-ancient-snack-bar-...
It is said we are so developed and wealthy and still we just build and live around ugly stuff all the time ...
mmm something changed
It’s not An Invasion per se...America was colonized. The impact of invasions are different in history’s timeline.
Regardess, those who reached American shores were the Puritans and their ilk anyways.
Genuinely curious.
For example, India was a colony of Britain. All trade was diverted to Britain to benefit them. The great famine of bengal for example was because farmers had to grow and send cotton to England rather than grow food for Indians. The economic activities were controlled by the colonizers armed forces.
The British colonized India. The Moghals invaded India. Alexander, The Great...for example..tried to invade India, but had to retreat. It’s usually done with armies vs colonizations that is through trade.
An invasion is when a military moved in and took over the government. The invaded country became the de facto territory of the invaders. And the invaded people have to live by the rule of the invaders. Example: Georgia was invaded by mongols and the Turks and then Russia. Each time, it became part of the other’s empire.
Usually invaders, like Alexander the Great, Tariq ibn Ziyad , Kublai Kan, Hernán Cortés or Napoleon will kill opposition(mostly males) but leave women and children and men who don't oppose them.
That means most of the society remains the same after the invaders take control of power, and grant special privileges to themselves, like owning the best land or having sex with the local women.
In the US, they never mixed with local population, they just expelled them of fertile soil until they died from starvation, illnesses or fights.
Likely the origins of: “Make Love, Not War.”
Kill the men..keep the children and women around.
Invasions strive to strengthen and diversify gene pools while colonists dont mingle genetics as all and all about racial purity.
Mexico and Central/South America instead starting as a military venture with mostly men raping/“marrying” the native women and having children that way.
The problem of some American architecture is not that they are too utilitarian - it's that they stopped being utilitarian in search of some nebulous artistic merit.
The same thing applies to the aqueducts, by the way. Sure, they were engineering projects, but they were constructed with an eye towards elegance and beauty.
Want to see a purely utilitarian aqueduct? Look up the Acqua Felice, built to restore Rome's water supply in the 16th century after a thousand years of interruption. Sure, it did the job, but it's much uglier than the old Roman aqueduct right next to it.
Now, modern buildings aren't just ugly because they focus entirely on function (like the Acqua Felice) -- they're intentionally and deliberately ugly and inhuman. Modern architecture is awful.
I agree. There's a community of us who feel this way! https://twitter.com/Arch_Revival_
A bit broad, surely?
It’s worth noting that when you look at 2000 year old buildings, you’re generally looking at stuff that both lasted 2000 years, so was probably of fairly high end construction, and that survived 2000 years without someone saying “we should pull that down and build an office block”. A lot of the stuff that didn’t survive mightn’t be so inspiring, and after the stuff around at the moment goes through the same filter, in the 40th century people may marvel at how amazing 20th century architecture was!
I wonder how granular people will look at this period of history in 2000 years. Just like how we tend to lump a period of half a millennium together as “roman times” people in 4000 ad might consider a 17th century cathedral and a 21st century court house to be from the same era.
With regard to the GP’s remark, I noticed this with fast food places in the United States. McDonalds there seem to have a much lower level of cleanliness than in parts of Europe. I assumed that running a McDonalds franchise is completely systematized: corporate gives you a series of three-ring binders that tells you exactly how clean everything must be, but if that is so, then enforcement still differs from country to country.
Furthermore, US McDonalds were often staffed by unattractive people (the disturbingly obese or the merely unphotogenic), while in Eastern Europe – whether due to lax laws or the specifics of the labor market – McDonalds often hires fairly nubile young women.
Some McDonalds I have been to in Europe were a whole dirtier than the ones I have frequented at home in New Zealand, but I put that down to frequenting the extremely high traffic tourist mcds rather than the normal traffic suburban restaurants.
Another recent Pompeii dig (I suppose probably the same team? I don't know): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25171041
I’ll just get my coat...
Why "equivalent"? Why can't we just say street food?
“It’s the first time we are excavating an entire termopolium”