Hugin&Munin
Presenter Of Images
Yes, I noticed this filler text again after a long time and I just wanted to know where it actually came from and who wrote it and I found it.
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Roman Resources
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Frank Petrexa
Tribune
Here is a paper from the Mormon university BYU. Also here is a translation of the "tabula puteolana" or "lex puteolana" regulating crucifixion in Puteoli near Naples.
(1) Most of this has been said here before, so it is unlikely we are going to get any really new information without archeology.
(2) Since there is a local law, it is likely that crucifixion varied from place to place and even in a given place, subject to regulations.
(3) There seems to be a major concern about handing bodies and segregating the handlers--probably for empirical health reasons but also maybe from religious and superstitious concerns.
I had to use links (files are too large).
https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/ssi25part3.pdf
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4457&context=facpub
(1) Most of this has been said here before, so it is unlikely we are going to get any really new information without archeology.
(2) Since there is a local law, it is likely that crucifixion varied from place to place and even in a given place, subject to regulations.
(3) There seems to be a major concern about handing bodies and segregating the handlers--probably for empirical health reasons but also maybe from religious and superstitious concerns.
I had to use links (files are too large).
https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/ssi25part3.pdf
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4457&context=facpub
willowfall
Senator
I think what is being missed in the conversation here is that we (as in modern industrial humans) have a radically different concept of things like "science" and "history" than our predecessors did BECAUSE of our technological capabilities and the creation of knowledge by those before us (including ancient societies). Some examples of things we don't or didn't "know" until very recently:
1) We really don't know what Lincoln actual said during the Gettysburg address because he was a second string speaker, nobody was really paying attention until he was a couple of sentences in (as journalist who were there admitted) and there were no recording devices. What we do have is his notes so that is what is generally given as the "Gettysburg Address". I know from my public speaking and teaching that many times my notes do not correspond to what I actually said.
2) Egyptology was not working out very well because they were relying both on the Old Testament (and nobody knows how many different times that has been edited) and Pharaonic sources of written propaganda. Once they threw out both those sources as primary and started to look at the facts on the ground things fell into place much more quickly (and even today new discoveries are making relatively new theories and 'settled' information obsolete).
3) Locations of famous battles were nebulous (not having GPS), Teutoburg Forest 9 AD the most famous example while narrowed down is still being debated today. And even something like the ship wreck (sunk by a Uboat in 1918) of the RMS Carparthia (the ship that famously rescued most of the Titanic survivors) was missed marked on Admiralty charts until about 2000. And rescue ships with "modern" navigation equipment were involved in the rescue of the survivors from the still floating ship.
You really can't have a scientific method until you invent modern concepts of science. You can't have a modern concept of historical research until you move away from history as a morality play and start to look at facts and have the ability to measure those facts.
I think if you took a Plato, or a Herodotus or a Aristarchus of Samos and gave them a modern education and modern technology they'd blow away most of the people we respect today in their various fields. They came up with information and concepts that have been accepted as valid centuries ago without all our technology. And because they believed in things beyond the physical realm they COULD touch and measure is no reason to assume they weren't brilliant.
And as to Philosophy itself, the "truth" or "falsehood" of that is extremely variable depending on the time, place and culture. If history is any indicator much of the "Philosophy" of today will be tomorrow's nonsense.
But think about this, if they hadn't started the process, recorded and tried to explain whet they saw, how much farther behind in the process would we be today?
kisses
willowfall
1) We really don't know what Lincoln actual said during the Gettysburg address because he was a second string speaker, nobody was really paying attention until he was a couple of sentences in (as journalist who were there admitted) and there were no recording devices. What we do have is his notes so that is what is generally given as the "Gettysburg Address". I know from my public speaking and teaching that many times my notes do not correspond to what I actually said.
2) Egyptology was not working out very well because they were relying both on the Old Testament (and nobody knows how many different times that has been edited) and Pharaonic sources of written propaganda. Once they threw out both those sources as primary and started to look at the facts on the ground things fell into place much more quickly (and even today new discoveries are making relatively new theories and 'settled' information obsolete).
3) Locations of famous battles were nebulous (not having GPS), Teutoburg Forest 9 AD the most famous example while narrowed down is still being debated today. And even something like the ship wreck (sunk by a Uboat in 1918) of the RMS Carparthia (the ship that famously rescued most of the Titanic survivors) was missed marked on Admiralty charts until about 2000. And rescue ships with "modern" navigation equipment were involved in the rescue of the survivors from the still floating ship.
You really can't have a scientific method until you invent modern concepts of science. You can't have a modern concept of historical research until you move away from history as a morality play and start to look at facts and have the ability to measure those facts.
I think if you took a Plato, or a Herodotus or a Aristarchus of Samos and gave them a modern education and modern technology they'd blow away most of the people we respect today in their various fields. They came up with information and concepts that have been accepted as valid centuries ago without all our technology. And because they believed in things beyond the physical realm they COULD touch and measure is no reason to assume they weren't brilliant.
And as to Philosophy itself, the "truth" or "falsehood" of that is extremely variable depending on the time, place and culture. If history is any indicator much of the "Philosophy" of today will be tomorrow's nonsense.
But think about this, if they hadn't started the process, recorded and tried to explain whet they saw, how much farther behind in the process would we be today?
kisses
willowfall
Frank Petrexa
Tribune
I won't disagree with you about most of that. I will say, however, that people like Archimedes (math and physics) and Aristotle (among other things he investigated embryology in sea urchins) did real experiments and didn't just postulate. The guy who calculated the radius of the earth did a real experiment. The "Antikythera Mechanism" for navigation, although based on a flawed cosmology, was a useful engineered navigation tool that was based on data and testing. Plato to my knowledge did nothing of that sort, preferring to expound assumptions.
William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) was undoubtedly brilliant. But he was notorious for not reading the literature of the day, and often proposed things that others had already thought of. Among his howlers were the following. "X-rays will prove to be a hoax"--not just a mistake but a lie. When a Norwegian scientist did difficult (physically taxing) observations in the snow and cold to correlate the northern lights to solar activity, Kelvin breezily dismissed it (and others disparaged it based on Kelvin's uninformed opinion) because "the sun is too far away". He said in 1901 that "there is nothing new in physics now"--this is before quantum mechanics and relativity, before the structure of the atom was known. In one book I have there is a quote from someone who talked to him about Rutherford's groundbreaking experiments on atomic structure: "I had a long conversation with Lord Kelvin about things of which he hasn't bothered to inform himself". Kelvin calculated the "age of the earth" based on rates of heat escape from deep wells to dismiss Darwin (who based evolution on painstakingly gathered data and still not satisfied only published it when he heard Wallace was going to publish something similar based on his own painstaking field observations), not realizing that radioactivity adds to that heat over time (which he can be forgiven for not knowing about) and that the earth is far from "isotropic and homogeneous" as his calculation assumed (which was known at the time). He dismissed volcanism as "relict heat".
So brilliant or not, I think Kelvin (who also didn't do experiments) was a lot like Plato--a pompous, egotistical ass.
Naraku
Draconarius
Kelvin also said, in 1895, “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”. Eight years later, the Wright Brothers proved him wrong, but there had already been unmanned flying machines and manned gliders by 1895.
It's not just Kelvin though. In a 1934 interview, Einstein said: “There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.”. To his credit, Einstein changed his tune as new discoveries were made and, in 1939, he co-signed a letter to Roosevelt warning of that the Germans could use nuclear fission to produce a bomb, which launched The Manhattan Project.
A good scientist will acknowledge being wrong when facts prove them so. A bad scientist will, like a dogmatist, will stand by their beliefs and deny the facts.
Frank Petrexa
Tribune
Note that Einstein doesn't claim that nuclear energy release is impossible. Kelvin uses words like "impossible" all the time. (In fact atoms can be "shattered at will" now, but nuclear energy comes from harnessing natural modes of atomic instability which Einstein didn't know about. Nuclear fission was only discovered in 1938 (Fermi saw it earlier but didn't recognize it). It was explained by Lisa Meitner--a Jewish academic in exile in Sweden from the Third Reich--and her nephew Otto Frisch in 1939. People saw right away the possibility of a bomb. That' why people like Fermi and Oppenheimer ended up at Los Alamos which was created in response to Einstein's letter to FDR.)
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Frank Petrexa
Tribune
Here is another way that we might recover ancient texts and get more information about Rome and other places. There is a similar "palimpset" recording some important work of Archimedes (who came close to inventing integral calculus thousands of years before Newton and Leibniz).
There is also a library of scrolls recovered from Pompei, apparently irreversibly charred by the eruption. If it could be read, it is likely we would have many more ancient texts that we only know about now by reference. They fell apart when people tried to gently unroll them. But now we have lasers and computers and it is possible to control scattering of light so distinct layers of can be read (sort of like how cat scans work). Individual letters have been seen by illuminating the layers of these scrolls, but it will take time and lots of work (and money). But the game of "illuminating" the past is not lost yet, even if Dr. Who never shows up.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/30/us/christian-manuscript-star-map-scn-trnd/index.html
There is also a library of scrolls recovered from Pompei, apparently irreversibly charred by the eruption. If it could be read, it is likely we would have many more ancient texts that we only know about now by reference. They fell apart when people tried to gently unroll them. But now we have lasers and computers and it is possible to control scattering of light so distinct layers of can be read (sort of like how cat scans work). Individual letters have been seen by illuminating the layers of these scrolls, but it will take time and lots of work (and money). But the game of "illuminating" the past is not lost yet, even if Dr. Who never shows up.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/30/us/christian-manuscript-star-map-scn-trnd/index.html
Loxuru
Graf von Kreuzigung
Ida Noddack, in 1934, interpreted Fermi's experiment correctly.
GURU12
Condemned
A text from 1230 CE from Gujarat shows that not just customers, but also
owners could use violence to coerce their slave girls. It was legal to “punish her by
kicking and catching her by the hair and tying up and beating her.”660 If a prostitute
refused a customer after a service agreement was made, she could be fined eight
times her fee unless the king was involved, then the punishment increased to 1000
lashes.
https://collections.lib.utah.edu/dl_files/06/ad/06ad34552348abb9d4f9b5e0b49053ff63aba2bd.pdf
owners could use violence to coerce their slave girls. It was legal to “punish her by
kicking and catching her by the hair and tying up and beating her.”660 If a prostitute
refused a customer after a service agreement was made, she could be fined eight
times her fee unless the king was involved, then the punishment increased to 1000
lashes.
https://collections.lib.utah.edu/dl_files/06/ad/06ad34552348abb9d4f9b5e0b49053ff63aba2bd.pdf
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THE SLAVE TRADE OF EUROPEAN WOMEN TO THE MIDDLE EAST AND ASIA FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE NINTH CENTURY
That's a very interesting thesis, thanks for posting the link. Essentially, it's a well-written history of the trade in female slaves from west (Mediterranean lands and the steppes) to east (Mesopotamia, India, China and SE Asia) from Babylonian times through to the Caliphate.
malins
Stumbling Seeker
A study into the properties of Roman concrete, which was and is quite an amazing thing
Very interesting, thanks Malins. I was aware that the long-lasting quality of Roman cement was still something of a mystery and that some scientists were working on it, but hadn't seen that finding. And specialists in restoring traditional buildings in Scotland have been trying to recreate the old mixtures for cement, mortar and harling (rendering over the stonework), they were better at coping with the weather than modern types. I don't think they used quicklime, maybe they should try it.
poem21045
Tribunus Plebis
Thanks, Malins!
I knew that ancient Romans were the first to create a cement that cured underwater (assisting the army engineers in building bridges), and that the formula was lost for several centuries, but I didn't know about the quicklime discovery.
willowfall
Senator
It is funny how modern people seem to think ancient people were primitive and technologically backwards and at the same time seem to forget OUR technology is based on all the technology that was discovered\invented in the centuries before leading up to our lives.
And in the field of medicine we are discovering that some of the things we read about in their writings and poopooed as nonsense .... isn't.
I jokingly tell my nieces and nephew when they tell me I'm not up on technology (I once made a living doing mainframe recovery) that their grandchildren will say to them "You had to touch the computer to make it work?"
I supposed the only consolation is 200 years from now humans will still be making the same wrong assumptions about us and our technology.
kisses
willwofall
And in the field of medicine we are discovering that some of the things we read about in their writings and poopooed as nonsense .... isn't.
I jokingly tell my nieces and nephew when they tell me I'm not up on technology (I once made a living doing mainframe recovery) that their grandchildren will say to them "You had to touch the computer to make it work?"
I supposed the only consolation is 200 years from now humans will still be making the same wrong assumptions about us and our technology.
kisses
willwofall
I had read an article on this about a year ago. It is fascinating how much old technology has been lost or forgotten. Mind you, these days nobody really builds for the long term. Modern cities generally seem to be built for the moment, with a view that we'll tear it all down in about 50 years and build something new.
Loxuru
Graf von Kreuzigung
Correct. A civil engineer explained me that once. Up to 100 years ago, engineers made their calculations for the required structural design, and then multiplied them by three, to be sure it would be safe. Sometimes, bridges designed that way, failed to collapse when blown up in wartime.
Today's building design is rather cost effective. The most expensive part, the foundations and basements, are built for durability, but what is erected upon them, is so sharped-edged concerning structural stability, that structural failures are allowed for, say, 15 percent over a designed lifetime (e.g. 30 years). Knowing that each gain of 5 percentpoints doubles the building cost (and for some structures, a higher stability level is required, e.g. nuclear power stations), investors rather prefer to 'postpone' this extra investment for 30 years later, when the old building would be structurally worn out and torn down (apart from the basement and foundations), so they will have a brand new one for the same (inflation corrected) extra budget as would have been needed 30 years earlier for a more structurally durable construction.
Of course, these financial constraints are less a concern, when you can save building costs by having the work done by slaves or serfs.
Naraku
Draconarius
But, not everything the Romans built was built to last. The insulae (apartment buildings) that most people in the city of Rome called home were notorious for collapsing because landlords cut corners and paid bribes to those responsible for enforcing building codes. Some of the richest people in Rome, like Cicero and Crassus, were notorious slum lords.
Juvenal wrote: “We inhabit a Rome held up for the most part by slender props since that’s the way management stop the buildings falling down.”
So, financial constraints are not just a modern thing.
Juvenal wrote: “We inhabit a Rome held up for the most part by slender props since that’s the way management stop the buildings falling down.”
So, financial constraints are not just a modern thing.
Frank Petrexa
Tribune
There is this--it seems the equivalent of laundry detergent pods has a long history.
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/roman-concrete-mystery-ingredient-scn/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/roman-concrete-mystery-ingredient-scn/index.html
malins
Stumbling Seeker
Yes that's the recent MIT study on the source of Roman cement's unusual durability that originally got us talking on the topic...
right, and a thing to be cautious with of course is survivorship bias.
Those Roman structures we still see around will by necessity impress us with being 'built to last' simply by way of having lasted.
The ones we aren't seeing anymore didn't necessarily all collapse due to shoddy building of course... a lot will have been taken apart for reusing their building material, or they were built over, buried under accumulated soil & garbage etc.
Though something like Pompeii should be a snapshot of general urban architecture, I don't know if there's a kind of statistical overview how 'solid' or not the building style was in general...?
While slaves don't get paid wages they still cause cost ... at the absolute minimum there's the opportunity cost, if you could get a contracted project done with fewer slaves then you could profitably use the excess labor power in the mines, on the fields or for the next project. And of course there are the direct costs for food, housing however simple, guards, overseers crucifiers etc...
Cultural incentives are surely going to be different when using slave vs paid labor... especially since a lot of the additional costs of the slave economy system are externalized from the people using slave labor - shifted to the entire society and its future.
Though apart from being not slavery-based, decentralization and more tenous transport infrastructure probably also made medieval Europe more inclined to use labor saving devices & techniques, and their most iconic 'built to last' structures (the cathedrals) were not so far as I'm aware generally raised by forced labor. (Castles could be different I guess, as local serfs could definitely be rounded up to work on them...)