TIL: Today I Learned
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Thera as antagonist to mycenae isnt very likely, though. Minoan crete a bit more likely & they possibly suffered greatly from the tsunami following the volcanic erruption at thera.
Then again, going by mythology, crete was a force at the early days of athens (theseus story), which obviously comes after the fall of mycenae.
Then again, going by mythology, crete was a force at the early days of athens (theseus story), which obviously comes after the fall of mycenae.
It has similarities. In both cases events prior to the Dark Age found a pathway through/around to show up in later times. For Homer a strong oral tradition of a great war fought against Troy made its way to his ears and he then created an epic tale around it. Most of Homer's tale was fictional, but it was rooted in truth even if Greeks of that age didn't believe Troy had been real. for Plato, he wanted to write a philosophical dialogue about an ideal state. He started with a family story passed down from Solon and then went full bore to embellish it to create his dialogue. and perhaps then write an epic poem himself based on the fantasy world he created.
Why couldn't they be an economic enemy? The Minoans did suffer from the Thera explosion, but while it certainly devastated them, the Mycenaeans took decades to actually cross the water to finally destroy them.
IIRC, none of the Minoan archaeological finds depict them at war. They don't appear to be very warlike. While we don't know much about Thera, it does fit nicely into the story the Egyptians recorded. There is no evidence either way to say how powerful a city it was.
There is not a single shred of evidence that the Iliad was "rooted in truth" any more than Journey to the West, Candide, or American Gods.
So small an island has little resources. First documented naval battle between greek powers is in the 8th century bc, between corinth and its old colony, kerkyra. In the time of the athenian empire it was pretty obvious that even a large and very rich island (eg samos) did not have the power to antagonise. Some pre-archaic tale about thera being a major power by itself seems like a tall tale.
Almost as bad as the iron islands, some place with barely any trees, building a thousand ships
Ajidica
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Serious, you have never heard of Despacito before? It was literally everywhere on the radio in 2017.TIL the #1 video on Youtube with 6 billion views is something I've never heard of before.
In Spanish?
My music tastes end in the mid 80s and even I've heard of it.
I just found out about the ketchup song a few weeks ago.
It was a thing in 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ketchup_Song_(Aserejé)
I also thought Toxic by Britney Spears was a 2016 song.
Yes, I'm oblivious musically.
Idk, but an epic poem about a Greek war against a city called Troy might well have roots in an actual city that did exist in the past and was likely destroyed in war. Even if Homer never thought the there was truth in the matter and it was nothing more than an old wive's tale, the fact that the war did happen certainly lends to the probability that such a tale did make its way through the Dark Age.
Did any recorded Greek history about Mycenae make it through the Dark Age?So small an island has little resources. First documented naval battle between greek powers is in the 8th century bc, between corinth and its old colony, kerkyra. In the time of the athenian empire it was pretty obvious that even a large and very rich island (eg samos) did not have the power to antagonise. Some pre-archaic tale about thera being a major power by itself seems like a tall tale.
Almost as bad as the iron islands, some place with barely any trees, building a thousand ships
Zkribbler
Deity
TIL the #1 video on Youtube with 6 billion views is something I've never heard of before.
In Spanish?
too bad they can barely sing
So small an island has little resources. First documented naval battle between greek powers is in the 8th century bc, between corinth and its old colony, kerkyra. In the time of the athenian empire it was pretty obvious that even a large and very rich island (eg samos) did not have the power to antagonise. Some pre-archaic tale about thera being a major power by itself seems like a tall tale.
Almost as bad as the iron islands, some place with barely any trees, building a thousand ships
Were the Greek islands more forested in for example around 800 BC ? Around 1500 BC ?
You say Samos. Not that many trees, forests there what I saw during a holiday. I criss-crossed the island Ikaria nearby as well. Same picture. Some areas on the good side of the mountains with more seasonal rain better off.
Samos had a big forest fire a couple of years before I was there.
That the cedars of the Lebanon were used up by early civilisations, by for example the Phenicians for ships, I can easy imagine. The same with ancient Samos.
And that once you have too many goats, new tree sprouts are eaten up before big enough, I can imagine as well.
Once your forests are gone and top soil blown away, perhaps they regrow not easy.
My question since you have read so much ancient Greek stories: were these islands fully forested originally before population density increased ?
What I see here in a big study on the Peloponnese, that there was possibly around 1250-1150 BC a start of a drying trend of the Climate, starting to bite really in 1100 BC, matching the decline of archeological sites in that period.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00438243.2018.1515035
When drier Climate passes a tipping point of more forest fires than the speed of reforestating, forests are bound to retreat to the sweet-spots, if any. The lessened volume under relatively more pressure of the civilisation.
You can win any battle against competitors with civilisation advantages, but at least in history so far, we could never win from climate changes, except adapt to it with better techs.
Here a graph of that Climate change showing the rainfall proxy from an Oxygen istope rate and the number of sites on the same time-axis:
Because the Oxygen isotope came from a stalagmite from a cave that stopped growing in 1000 BC (assumed to have happened from too dry climate), there are no data for the period after 1000 BC.
here just some text from that longggg article on the relation between climate and civ development with many links to sources:
Here another article more in layman terms from pollen analysis suggesting that the Bronze Age collapse was Climate driven:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/climate-change-may-have-brought-ancient-egypt-to-its-knees/
That final suggestion I find interesting as well.
Was the Climate change less severe for the Rome, Italy area ? or even beneficial ?
Is that the reason that the ancient Greek culture slowly declined compared to Rome ?
Was the decline of Carthago driven by the growing size of the Roman empire, destined to happen, or more driven by the Climate change around Carthago ?
I wish i could say, but i only know of some densely wooded islands. Eg sphakteria, where many spartans were captured by athens.
Iirc at its height of power athens had a few hundred ships. Compare to places like syracuse which had a few tens of ships.
Iirc at its height of power athens had a few hundred ships. Compare to places like syracuse which had a few tens of ships.
Wood was immensely important for economies until at least the coal/iron era.
Bronze important for military and the one on the banner of our traditional era naming (with Tin the issue , the mineral to get... driving the first "globalised" trade network... copper abundant enough)
But ships for naval civilisations need lots of wood, needing even more trees because not all tree did grow in the right way to deliver good shaped timber.
Bronze important for military and the one on the banner of our traditional era naming (with Tin the issue , the mineral to get... driving the first "globalised" trade network... copper abundant enough)
But ships for naval civilisations need lots of wood, needing even more trees because not all tree did grow in the right way to deliver good shaped timber.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
TIL that, before the Easter Rising, some of the leaders of the Irish Volunteers considered offering an independent Irish crown to Prince Joachim of Prussia, the youngest son of Wilhelm II. Apart from the strategic benefit of alignment with Imperial Germany, the plan was to teach him Irish but not English, making him an improbable figurehead of the Irish language revival.
It fell through because: obviously, and it's a sign of how much the world changed between 1915 and 1919 that it now seems preposterous. But it suggests an interesting alt-history where Ireland becomes one of those planned German client-kingdoms, like Finland or the Baltic. I just wonder what they would have called him, because there doesn't appear to be any Irish equivalent to "Joachim". Perhaps they would have taken his middle name, "Franz", as "Proinsias"? And would they keep "Hohenzollern", or would they pick an Irish substitute like the Windsors né Saxe-Coburg-Gothas? Perhaps calque it into Irish like the Mountbattens né Battenbergs? ("Ard... something"? I couldn't work out "zollern".)
"Proinsias mac Uilliam, Rí na hÉireann". There's a thought.
It fell through because: obviously, and it's a sign of how much the world changed between 1915 and 1919 that it now seems preposterous. But it suggests an interesting alt-history where Ireland becomes one of those planned German client-kingdoms, like Finland or the Baltic. I just wonder what they would have called him, because there doesn't appear to be any Irish equivalent to "Joachim". Perhaps they would have taken his middle name, "Franz", as "Proinsias"? And would they keep "Hohenzollern", or would they pick an Irish substitute like the Windsors né Saxe-Coburg-Gothas? Perhaps calque it into Irish like the Mountbattens né Battenbergs? ("Ard... something"? I couldn't work out "zollern".)
"Proinsias mac Uilliam, Rí na hÉireann". There's a thought.
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No.
Italy had an extremely high population compared to most other regions in the classical Mediterranean, and the Roman Republic was a polity that was unusually good at harnessing that population for military purposes. Rome's manpower was nearly exhausted multiple times but the Romans managed to avoid a disaster severe enough to bring down their empire. The rise of Rome was fundamentally contingent on military events, and the course of those events was made likely by Italy's relatively high population and resource mobilization capability. That relatively high population wasn't really a function of temporary climatic conditions because, well, Italy is pretty big and contains a lot of arable land compared to North Africa or Greece.
There is no evidence that any of this was affected by climate change, nor does climate change improve the explanatory power of the existing thesis. There is no significant climatological event that neatly corresponds to the time period, and no line of causation between such an event and the course of Rome's wars in the Mediterranean.
The "like the Romans" part of the article is frankly horrendous and bad history. Drawing a connection between the Late Bronze Age and events of literally a millennium later is silly.
There have also been serious questions about the timing of the Late Bronze collapse compared to local climate variability. They don't actually line up that neatly. It would be nice if it were more convincing.
That the Roman culture was highly efficient in converting economy and population into military power. I think no doubt. Not from me anyway.
That Climate.
Climate can take a big effect on population from food. Temperature and rainfall (at the right moments) important. And to take effect on competing civilisations, like with Carthago, Greece, the effects must be locally differing as well.
And it has to fit well enough. Some inertia or hysteresis effects around volatility for sure there.
Local effects of temperature less likely, but local rainfall can much more easier differ.
I never digged into it really for Rome. That from Greece was about trees.
And I always like the idea that military power is also on the back of less thrilling factors as economy or a new crop.
What I see in some quick glances is that the Roman period was a bit warmer (but no indication that this was otherwise in Greece etc). Humidity/rainfall a lot more difficult. Although historical lake water height should help there.
So many methods. Other stalagmites of the right period like that other study helpfull as well. As usual lots to research there.
Do you have any links on measurements in that humidity aspect ?
Yes, short-term climate changes can affect food supply. Everybody acknowledges the seriousness of a series of bad harvests.
However, it is kind of difficult to actually determine the extent to which climatological fluctuations determined agricultural output in the long term, and almost impossible to go from there to actually demonstrating second- and third-order effects like long-term population, national wealth, and so on. The only period for which anybody has even attempted to do it is the seventeenth century, and there are serious methodological arguments about whether the existing data actually demonstrate a meaningful change.* If we have such problems for a period for which we have a reasonably large quantity of relevant data, you can imagine how difficult it can be when trying to prove something about climate in the Late Bronze collapse. Such claims would be extremely speculative by necessity. Even if we had a very precise picture of the climate in the period we would be a long way from being able to argue that it had a clear and causative relationship with military affairs. The academic article you quoted earlier is much more circumspect about the implications of the research than is the TIME article, and with good reason.
Military power certainly is dependent on "less thrilling" (lol) factors like the economy. And national economy is to a very large extent conditioned by local geography and climate. But climate has unbelievably complex effects on human geography, to the point that the sort of changes that are regular throughout human history can be difficult to clearly connect to specific things happening. With the possible exception of the General Crisis, given the current state of the data, explaining political events through climate change badly overreaches the evidence. There is, of course, nothing wrong with suggesting its relevance. And in lieu of adequately supported competing examples, climate might be accepted by default. That is not the case with the rise of Rome.
Historians do, however, regularly accept the use of weather as a way to condition and even determine human actions. It's much easier to trace short-term causation with weather.
* The General Crisis is a matter of heavy historiographical debate even though its proponents can point to actual written sources indicating that many people thought that climate change was at least partially responsible for their troubles at the time. There are no such written sources for the Late Bronze Age, and no Roman or Greek ever attempted to connect climate to Rome's conquest of the Mediterranean. So already any attempt to explain Rome through climate is pretty weak, and that's without getting into whether it's even possible to measure a consistent trend in period climate that would have had such an effect.
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