Ancient History Buffs Thread

[galileanTactician]

Aight yall, it's time to grab your Tardis/Tubular Phone Booth/Eye of Agamotto, because this thread is all about Ancient History!

Anything up to Pre-Colonial times is alright, but I swear upon the mighty light of Apollo, if I see any WW2 stuff I'm gonna snap on a fool.

[Oddhi]

Guess I will begin some discourse here.

Greeks > Romans

[calamityCons]

FUCK both the Greeks and the Romans. ESPECIALLY the Athenians. Those misogynistic bastards can just get the fuck out.

[Oddhi]

FUCK both the Greeks and the Romans. ESPECIALLY the Athenians. Those misogynistic bastards can just get the fuck out.

Honestly? Valid.

[BrobyDDark]

Question: does anybody have any idea who the fuckin sea peoples were

[calamityCons]

My best guess is Greeks, a Beta version of the Greeks, or their own peoples who were subsumed by the Greeks. Maybe the Mycenaean Greeks?

[arachnidsGrip]

...Is this thread suitable for history WAY further back than human history too? Like, prehistory? Dinosaurs?

[galileanTactician]

...Is this thread suitable for history WAY further back than human history too? Like, prehistory? Dinosaurs?

Stone Age history is more akin to the themes of the thread, but not Dinosaurs or anything prehistorical.

[galileanTactician]

FUCK both the Greeks and the Romans. ESPECIALLY the Athenians. Those misogynistic bastards can just get the fuck out.

I absolutely love the culture of the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and the uncountable Greco-Roman city-states, but I'd be lying if I said that i didn't hold any disdain for how they wrote off the Persian Empire as just a massive evil and menacing empire, because the Persian actually really liked the Greeks! And not just them, they respected the cultures of the local peoples of Mesopotamia and let them keep their monarchal autonomy as they conquered their lands. Hell, they even went so far as to write "Lover of Greece" on their currency just as a sign of admiration!

[calamityCons]

Figures those bastards would shit on the Persians even in the face of all of Persia's kindness :V Ancient Greece as a conglomerate abstract entity has a lot more problems than people think, and in spite of their enormous contributions to art and architecture, many of their philosophies and worldviews that continue into today are really difficult to reconcile with modern sensibilities.

[galileanTactician]

Figures those bastards would shit on the Persians even in the face of all of Persia's kindness :V Ancient Greece as a conglomerate abstract entity has a lot more problems than people think, and in spite of their enormous contributions to art and architecture, many of their philosophies and worldviews that continue into today are really difficult to reconcile with modern sensibilities.

I mean i get what you're saying with how they were portraying the Persians and the role of women in their society, but this whole GRR THOSE GREEK BASTARDS approach you're taking here is... well... it's not really how anyone should look at history, modern or ancient. What would your stance be if the Persians won the war and they downplayed the Greeks as a group of unruly, loosely allied brutes who rabidly assaulted the Empire in the name of their vaguely established independence. There's always a bias at play, and in the case of the Greeks it was the bias of Herodotus, the first person who documented the Greco-Persian War, who decided to portray the Empire as monstrous and all consuming. Not to say that the Persians are completely venerable at all, as they had many of the same problems Mycenaean Greece had at the time including misogyny, but the fact stills stands that the bias of someone who had been on the winning side of history wrote down what they saw with extreme bias. The whole point of understanding history is to explain the who what where when and the why of these happenings, and this includes how people used the attitudes of the times that these people came from to justify things like war, adultery, misogyny, misandry, murder, power, betrayal, and how the general scheme of their society functioned. You can't just play favorites with historical figures either, because while Leonidas I was a overly masculine misogynist who adored bloodshed and threw babies off of cliffs, without the efforts of Sparta, Athens, or any of the other city states, we wouldn't have some of the many things that make up our society today, for better or for worse. Xerxes too, he did pull that whole "Worship me, I am a god" stunt and actively slaughter hundreds of Greeks who didn't want to bow down before him and Persia. Let's also not forget that with most of the stronger men out fighting Xerxes, Gorgo, wife to Leonidas stepped up to the plate as both Archon and general of the entire city-state, and was quite effective at being a strong and fearsome ruler for Sparta. It's all about perspective, because there is no such thing as a Bad Guy or a Good Guy, just people following the banner of their ideology, their race, their kingdom because of their beliefs, no matter how fucked up or outdated they are.

[calamityCons]

I was exaggerating my dislike of ancient Greece for humorous effect, apologies if that wasn't clear. I agree that history is more complicated than that.

[galileanTactician]

I was exaggerating my dislike of ancient Greece for humorous effect, apologies if that wasn't clear. I agree that history is more complicated than that.

S'all good man, we're just here to have a good time chatting it up about History n' shit. Didn't mean to get all discourse mode on you.

[Tarty_]

Migration period was fun.
I fucking despise repost sites that add a watermark but I'm too lazy to edit.

[Sokota]

Diogenes was the only true philosopher from Ancient Greece, and we are all featherless bipeds.

[galileanTactician]

Diogenes was the only true philosopher from Ancient Greece, and we are all featherless bipeds.

Used to have a Diogenes quote as my signature before i used the Blues Brothers.
Dude was such a baller that he flexed on Alexander the Great and he lived to brag about it.

Edit: Imagine being consumed by modern luxuries
This post made by Cynic Gang.

[galileanTactician]

Guess I will begin some discourse here.

Greeks > Romans

Byzantines > Greeks > Romans

[Tarty_]

Guess I will begin some discourse here.

Greeks > Romans

Byzantines > Greeks > Romans

O
S T A V R O S
N I K A
-has another civil war-

[galileanTactician]

Question: does anybody have any idea who the fuckin sea peoples were

I wanna say either Mycenaean Greeks, Proto Carthaginians, or the Minoans. Though I am probably very very wrong in that assumption.

[Crpal]

Can we give it up for the dang Chinese Zhou Dynasty for managing to maintain control over Central China for like 800 years. (1046-256 BC)

No one talks about Ancient China for some godawful reason.