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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Something that has fascinated, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that the Romans so successfully eradicated a local history in that some cases and places there is virtually no knowledge of what was before Rome. The greatest example is of Romania, which clearly wasn't called that - it was Dacia. But we don't know a great deal about Dacia or the post-Greek kingdoms that were in this region before Dacia because of just how effectively Rome could erase a history after conquering the region.

We know only what was totally destroyed. But elsewhere there is a richer history that was passed down and survived. In the lands where Rome wanted to impose themselves, pottery and ruins is all that remains.

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The Romans definitely did obliterate some cultures, Carthage most prominently - they retrieved some specific books they thought would be useful but burnt everything else. Dacia certainly suffered more than many Roman conquests, its capital was destroyed, huge numbers of slaves were extracted, and there was a huge influx of Romans after it became a province.

Others fared better - obviously Rome was much enamoured of Greek culture, but would have struggled to stamp it out even if it didn't absorb it. Egypt's history was fairly durable in that it was written, widely distributed and well-preserved in the climate of North Africa. Bear in mind that much of what survives about Rome itself is through a series of incredibly lucky events, many of which come down to Rome being the seat of Christendom for so long, which meant texts survived (even as palimpsests) in monasteries etc.

Tacitus gives us a speech by one Calgacus, a British chieftain facing Roman conquest, who probably sums them up quite neatly:

"But there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace."

>Carthage most prominently

They had it coming. The Romans weren't lying about the ritual child sacrifice.

Yes, they were. The archaeological record indicates they cremated infants instead of burying them, but there is no indication the infants were murdered. There are many cultures where infants aren't named until age two or so. When infant mortality is high, cultures have to find ways to cope with it, and differing funeral customs are part of it.

It's quite a large body of scholarship (much of it quite recent) to reject. But even so, the Romans also performed human sacrifices so it's hard to score points either way.

Is there evidence of actual active Roman "eradication" of Dacian history? It is not the Romans' fault that no history was preserved if nothing existed to preserve to begin with. We know a great deal about the Greeks before the Roman conquest because they already had a written historical tradition to be preserved.

Even if there were native written histories, without careful tending, history destroys itself through entropy over the centuries. For this reason, the vast majority of what the Romans knew about themselves is also entirely lost to us. e.g., only about a quarter of the books from the magnum opus of Rome's history of itself, Livy's "Ab urbe condita", are preserved today.

The Dacian capital was razed and vast swathes of the population sold into slavery. Destruction of their culture and history may not have been the objective, but it was a pretty much inevitable result.

Historiography was not something that really existed in places not heavily influenced by the Greeks. The first history book by a Roman was written around the time of the second punic wars (around 210 BC). In Persia the Sassanids and Parthians knew less about their Achaemenid past than the Greeks/Romans did. I'm not denying the atrocities committed by the Romans but chances are that both in Dacia and the Celtic world there weren't that many (if any) literary sources to destroy.

Sure, but who knows how many statues, inscriptions or other archaeological evidence was looted and destroyed.

The region that is now Germany was part Roman, part not. We know very little about the parts that weren't, and most of what we know is from a few failed Roman expeditions. Of those places not even those expeditions reached: some pottery, some traces you might call ruins if you're very generous, some tribe names that Romans picked up third hand.

We typically have extremely limited history of any civilization that didn't have a pervasive and resilient writing system. A lot of cuneiform clay tablets survive, for example, because they were in a library in a city that burned and that burning baked the clay.

Fun fact: there are an estimated 500,000 to 1 million cuneiform tablets sitting in museums around the world. Less than 10% have ever been translated.

Papyrus was another medium for the written record in ancient times and it doesn't tend to survive long. Longer lasting materials only really came about centuries later when vellum and longer lived paper. So any papyrus works only tended to survive because they were repeatedly copied.

As to roman's eradicating history, let me add thsi context: the origins of Rome itself is largely unknown. Rome was sacked by the Celtic Gauls in (IIRC) the 4th centure BCE so now we have legends that are more likely fiction than fact and may well just be apocryphal (eg Romulus and Reemus). Reconstructing something as well-known (at the time) as the Twelve Tables was a significant effort.

Also consider that before the Romans there were the Etruscans. Not much is really known about them at all. They had their own language including a written language but it's never been deciphered as we simply don't have enough samples. Those we have are typically from burial sites. IIRC one of the more significant fragments was found because an Etruscan manuscript was used in wrapping a mummy.

So my point is that histories don't tend to survive, even for the conquerors, so a claim about eradicating history needs a lot of supporting evidence.

I once read a fantastic simple explanation of this: For many places in Europe, Rome is the beginning of history. Because history is the study of written materials. Anything before the written word is, by definition, pre-history.

For much of Europe, Rome brought writing.

I would say, and this is just a thought so I'm not sure if it's true, Rome also brought centralized society. Writing was a component of this. They are not necessarily tired together but in practise are.

Hmm. Would you say Greece was a centralized society? But they had writing.

If "centralized" means "living in cities instead of rural", then Greece was centralized. But if you mean "ruled by one central authority who defines the language and how words are written", then Greece was not centralized.

Good argument. Seems clear my thoughts was wrong.

Perhaps a centralized society needs writing but a society with writing doesn't need to be centralized.

Greece is perhaps special too in that the sea makes natural political boundaries, you could also argue that it was somewhat (but not completely) culturally homogenous.

When I was studying Norse mythology (for fun, not academically) I read that even though Scandinavians were in close contact with Romans, Greeks, Arabs and even Indians via trading routes, they didn't really commit too much to writing. They had runic inscriptions on stones and gold, but that's kinda it. They only really took to writing after they converted to Christianity, which is why we have stuff like Snorri Sturluson's Eddas.

Not in Iberia.

The Romans usually let the existing culture and society survive as long as the peoples religion didn’t contradict the Roman gods and the taxes flowed.

Even without Rome, history from that era is not well known. Having architecture and literature spread widely across a continent like the romans will last a lot longer than wooden buildings and an oral tradition of a small localised tribe.

There are two factors at play here. The first one is a matter of archaeology. During the majority of the Roman period, most things were written on papyrus (or sometimes slices of wood or wax tablets). (Stone and clay tablets were also used - just not for everyday things.) This was true of the majority of places Rome conquered as well - although those places tended to produce much less writing to begin with anyway. The trouble with papyrus and these other materials is that it doesn't preserve very well, which means that the vast majority of papyrus that archaeologists have uncovered comes specifically from Egypt (because of climate reasons), and may give rise to the impression that Romans eradicated local histories in some places while preserving them in others. Roughly contemporaneous with the decline of the (Western) Roman Empire, parchment became much more common in writing, and parchment preserves much better than papyrus. The timing of parchment's adoption means much more writing survived from late antiquity than earlier periods.

Secondly, while it's true that the Romans weren't particularly interested in preserving local history and culture, that doesn't seem to have been particularly unusual of any civilization throughout antiquity. We don't have evidence for, say, the transmission of Bronze Age inscriptions that were carved into stone. It's actually far more unusual that people preserved Roman stuff!

> This was true of the majority of places Rome conquered as well - although those places tended to produce much less writing to begin with anyway

Well in the Greek dominated Mediterranean it was the other way around. Chances are that without the Greeks we'd know even less about the early republic than we do. North of the Alps this is an understatement close to nothing was written down.

This is a bit random, but your comment reminded me of the film The Dacians (1966) which portrays the impending Roman invasion of Dacia. It's a good film. I don't know how historically accurate it is, though.

That is just the effect of systemic illiteracy of a society.. what is not taught in a trades like system, forever vanishes and now is all there is and was, besides strange tales by grandpa.

You are wrong. The Romans didn’t erase anything because nothing was written down.

Once Rome conquered Egypt, they had a monopoly on Egyptian papyrus. That's why we know a lot more about periods of Roman rule than about areas outside of the empire or provinces when Rome did not control them.

Rome didn't have to eradicate local cultures. It just had to write things down more than the locals did.

Also most of those local didn't even have a writing system in the first place. I'm not sure papyrus is really that important, clay tablets worked fine in earlier periods and parchment was superior to it in most senses besides much higher cost. Had the Romans switched to parchment several centuries earlier we'd probably know way more about them.

Also whoever hold Egypt in the past: the Egyptians themselves, Persians, the Macedonians technically monopolized the papyrus trade. Nevertheless the trade still went on, that simply how ancients economies worked.

I think a bigger factor is that due to over-harvesting the plant used to make papyrus it became much more expensive as time went on making parchment much more competitive.

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