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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

The Eastern front of the Roman Empire is full of surprises. One fact that always impresses me is that one of the largest hippodromes in the Roman Empire is found in modern-day Tyr, in the South of Lebanon. The entire region is dotted with Roman presence.

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The area was heavily urbanised before Rome was around, it stands to reason that it remained relevant throughout the Roman Empire (to the point of being the Roman Empire after the slow collapse of the Western administration).

Such that Constantinople was more or less the center of "Western Civ" for, like, a thousand years.

Do you mean Constantinople was the center of civilization such as a thousand years? Or was it identical to a thousand years?

Never fear; the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary can help you out:

> like, adverb

> 2. used in very informal speech to show that what you are saying may not be exactly right but is nearly so

Pedantry is neither clever nor educational.

> Pedantry is neither clever nor educational.

What about irony?

Is that when something resembles an iron?

Exactly. Irony means, like, iron.

Wait. Like iron, or like an iron?

And what's the difference between "irony", "ironic", and "ironous"?

Sorry, what I ment to say was like an iron. Ironous is, like, iron.

Depends on the definition of Western, considering it originally refers to post-Roman Latin states.

Tyr was a old and rich city when the Roman were still a random Latin tribes in Italy.

Carthage was founded by Tyr. The Phoenician are the one who bring the alphabet in Mediterranean as well.

During Roman time, Tyr has lost his power. But I guess it was still a important place culturally ? Like … Rome now?

Probably more than Rome now, but even so at the time they were not quite powerful militarily. The Phoenician never succeeded in building an empire or a military power. Carthage was the "best" and even them they sucked much comparing to the Roman/Italians. Carthage itself didn't have a military but hired mercenaries. The Phoenicians are a bunch of rich merchants and they probably re-arranged themselves in the new empire.

Absolutely, I’m on a Phoenician kicks those days.

I think they are vastly underestimated. For instance their navy and how they were building ships in a industrial manner is impressive. ( sourcing ready made parts from different specialized places)

But clearly those guys were not empire builder. They would probably have been happy to keep being a Roman protectorate after the Punic wars. They were still making tons of money via the Iberia trades.

Like they did under the Egyptian or the Assyrian.

Something I still don’t quiet grasp is why we have so little direct written account. They invented those letters ffs.

the barycenter of human civilization has lingered over this broader area for millennia. It is sad that in modern times it never managed to gain at least some basic stability, if not a revival and renewed contributions to the human storybook.

maybe its the curse of the oil. maybe its something else.

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It was much more a response to islamic expandism than a cursed dream.

European messianic dreams is an interesting way to describe three religions that all originated and were exported from from this general region, not in Europe.

the causes might be viciously debatable and challenged but the lost opportunity (versus a counterfactual universe where there is less strife and destruction and more coherence and construction) is quite tangible. one can only hope that the recent past is not the exact predictor of the future.

Funny, most people in the West seem unaware of the numerous Islamic attacks and messianic dreams of Islam. The ottoman empire was also a Muslim empire...again something people seem to forget about.

And don't get me started on the Muslim tradition of enslaving everyone.

There is some weird kind of selective amnesia in the west, we at the same time downplay our achievements and put the focus on our perceived errors. While everybody else is doing the exact opposite, so not only we teach our kids to hate themselves we give good reasons for others to do so as well.

It's as if the only empires that existed were Europeean and the only slaves that existed were from the atlantic trade

Ironic given how basically every civilisation did similar things, Europeans were just better at it for a small time but before them Arabs had a good go at it too, not even mentioning the Chinese empire. The whole world and its history is a shit show, just because you're at the tip of one of the remaining branch doesn't mean you have to hate your country and everything it did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Muslim_conquests

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_Caliphate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almohad_Caliphate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Asia#:~:text=Slaver....

> There is some weird kind of selective amnesia in the west, we at the same time downplay our achievements and put the focus on our perceived errors.

There are those and those, and each side says something like this about the other, the real minority is realistically seeing the whole picture.

Also self-reflection isn't a bad thing, we can only change ourselves and then influence others (hopefully without force :)).

> Also self-reflection isn't a bad thing

Of course, but you can't call yourself a victim 24/7 while at the same time not acknowledging other countries/religions/whatever faults.

It's rarely black nor white, and the shade of grey varies depending on which side and which period you're born into

Arabs had a good go at it? As in past tense?

Last I checked slavery is still very common in many arab nations as we speak?

Do you mean the greek and roman tradition of enslaving everyone, and the American and English tradition of enslaving everyone?

What about the pan-African and Mesoamerican traditions of enslaving everyone? Slavery was pretty much everywhere in the world. Then Christians invented the idea of not enslaving fellow Christians, then Muslims did the same (which really helped the spread of both religions!).

Mathematically speaking, you reading this are the descendant of enslaved peoples. They could be so far back that it doesn’t affect your economic status, like being a Mamluk in Egypt, or a Carthaginian in Rome, or a Hebrew in Egypt. But all of humanity was touched by this non-peculiar institution.

The Arab slave trade was huge and racist in its own way (where poorer, usually darker skinned peoples were enslaved and traded by wealthier, lighter skinned peoples.) Western European colonial ambitions definitely wounded the area significantly but the Islamicate world was still practicing slavery after Western Europe had largely banned it and stopped practicing it. It's recent enough in Islamicate history that traditionalist groups lay claim to slavery as a custom even now in the region.

Then don’t say it. Simplistic and one-sided commentary on history are best left out of a conversation.

Eh, maybe you're right. The thread is starting to devolve. I'll delete it .

You only managed to delete your comment - not the thread. Future readers are left with no context.

The region has been at war at least since we learned how to write... well before modern religions even existed

> It is sad that in modern times it never managed to gain at least some basic stability,

It is not just about modern times:

It was fought over by:

* Akkadians

* Hittites

* Egyptians

* Assyrians

* Babylonians

* Achmenid Persians

* Greeks

* Macedonians

* Seleucids

* Ptolemies

* Romans

* Parthians

* Sassanian Persians

* Byzantines

* Arabs

* Seljuk Turks

* Crusaders

* Mongols

* Ottoman Turks

* Safavid Persians

* French

* British

* Americans

(And I am sure I am leaving out many others)

For a long time, this part of the word has been the battleground between Empires. It stands at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The instability is not just a modern phenomenon

Well, you're looking at 4000 year time scale. There were large periods of time throughout where there was stability over wide parts of it over the scale of decades or even centuries.

> maybe its the curse of the oil.

There is no oil in the Eastern Mediterranean. Only in the past decade has offshore drilling started to explore natural gas.

In recent history it's largely due to the Sykes-Picot agreement. The Ottoman Empire fell at a time when nationalism was arising and empires were going out of favor. In that power vacuum, inaccurate lines were drawn in the sand by colonial powers with little stake in life in the region. Since then every nation carved out of the area has been fighting over anything and everything because historically the area was ruled by large empires rather than the nation-states that were arbitrarily drawn there now. The history of the area is so old and intertwined that every country there has a claim of something on the other side of their borders within spitting distance. Western Europe had similar issues when the Western Roman Empire collapsed.

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