111–117 of 117 posts
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The subtext is that the Romans weren't beating on each other with clubs.
You're making the same mistake. What did they use, spears? Can't you make spears from wood and stone? I guess you must mean swords, but I feel that the subtext of your comments is humble-bragging how obvious these things are to you. See my comment to your sibling comment by neuronic.
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It seems like in this case, there was a vague description that didn't align with her acute knowledge of a very specific/esoteric subject. Her father was an archival researcher at the monastery. So to get better at this, a good path would probably be to develop general critical observation skills, as well as a deep understanding of particular subjects that you'd be exposed to.
I think you may be misreading the term "father" in this context. It's not that the grad student's literal biological father is a researcher at the monastery. One of the priests/monks, who carry the honorific title Father[0], is an archival researcher in the monastery. [0] https://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/d003rpHowToAddre...
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You can, but they're not practical weapons, either, really. Once decent ironworking was available, bronze became largely impractical for edged weapon manufacture, to the extent that you'd be unlikely to find one.
My understanding is that iron weapons were not greatly superior to bronze, just cheaper/easier to make.
High quality pattern welded[1] steel swords were available in Roman times from at least 150 BC[2], and by 600 AD were ubiquitous. They were later mostly replaced by easier steel production techniques.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_welding#Pattern_weldin...
[2] See the table of finds in https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_b/backbone/rb...
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No, I'm not sure about copyright on most of them and how fair use would work for that. (I also have a map collection that is pretty awesome that suffers the same issue.)
That’s an interesting space. There should be a way to share just file hashes with a description and basic metadata for each of them, eg: dea939...82f A scan of Newton’s personal notebook, page 13 (image from London Museum of History, 2013, 8000x6000 pixels) That way people who like to build such collections would have ways to share and compare theirs, and see if they have anything missing from bigger datasets, etc. Y…
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I'm not a historian / archaeologist, so I can't really be sure here, but I would have assumed bronze would have been valued throughout history for-at least-it's appearance? I also would have assumed the fun-factor has been a historical constant too? If you're wealthy enough, at any time since the bronze age, you might want a bronze version of [thing] for the same reasons people want a bronze [thing] now?
You raise an interesting point, and one that I have thought about quite often. In archaeology, there seems to be an assumption that people in the past only ever did things for two reasons: Utility and religion. If an object doesn't seem to have an obvious usefulness, it's assumed that the artifact is of religious nature. People have not changed much in the last few thousand years, and thins that we find interesting t…
This isn't really true at all. For example, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri[1] is an ancient rubbish dump full of all kinds of random documents. One of the more amusing ones is "The contract of a wrestler agreeing to throw his next match for a fee".
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> why anyone would pick on Scythia as a place to come from? still a bit of a thing today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans#Steppe_th...
I wanted to answer to arethuza but you just provided a reference to the essence of what I was going to say: "The [...] Indo-Europeans, a nomadic culture of the Pontic-Caspian steppe, expanded in several waves during the 3rd millennium BC. Their expansion coincided with the taming of the horse." Basically, using horses as an overpowering advantage over others, the people living in the space that was later inhabited by…
NB Scots in the sense of Dál Riata Scots, who eventually became the most powerful grouping in what became Scotland in the 9th century.
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How big is this farm?
-Not very big; approximately a square kilometer (.4 sqm) all told - most of which is forest and a mountainside. Some 30,000sqm arable land, all of which is maintained by neighbours who are active farmers -both my wife and I are engineers.