Our Secret 2015-12-09

[Jabberwonky]

This was the time when Justinian planned, quite seriously, to attempt to reunite the Roman empire by re-conquering Italy and driving out the Ostrogoths.

Rome was conquered by Pokémon?

[jwhouk]

Oh, yeah... Definitely. The whole mess between the three main abrahamic faiths and all of the little bits and groups within each of them has been an absolute endless well of conflict for thousands of years.

I've always thought of writing an alternate history of the world, where Rome got its s**t together and Constantine didn't convert... Thus resulting in the abrahamic faiths failing to stick to the wall.

Problem is, I'm not nearly a good enough political scientist, anthropologist, or historian to really make a good enough guess. But it is still a really interesting thought experiment I ponder at night when I can't sleep. There is much fun to be had in that mental simulation.

Had Constantine not converted, it's likely Rome would have fallen much sooner than it did. In fact, if you want a steampunk universe, the early fall of Rome would probably be a trigger point.

[GlytchMeister]

Oh, yeah... Definitely. The whole mess between the three main abrahamic faiths and all of the little bits and groups within each of them has been an absolute endless well of conflict for thousands of years.

I've always thought of writing an alternate history of the world, where Rome got its s**t together and Constantine didn't convert... Thus resulting in the abrahamic faiths failing to stick to the wall.

Problem is, I'm not nearly a good enough political scientist, anthropologist, or historian to really make a good enough guess. But it is still a really interesting thought experiment I ponder at night when I can't sleep. There is much fun to be had in that mental simulation.

Had Constantine not converted, it's likely Rome would have fallen much sooner than it did. In fact, if you want a steampunk universe, the early fall of Rome would probably be a trigger point.

I was once told that if Rome hadn't fallen, the Crusades would have been televised... That was basically the seed of the idea.

[Sgt. Howard]

Oh, yeah... Definitely. The whole mess between the three main abrahamic faiths and all of the little bits and groups within each of them has been an absolute endless well of conflict for thousands of years.

I've always thought of writing an alternate history of the world, where Rome got its s**t together and Constantine didn't convert... Thus resulting in the abrahamic faiths failing to stick to the wall.

Problem is, I'm not nearly a good enough political scientist, anthropologist, or historian to really make a good enough guess. But it is still a really interesting thought experiment I ponder at night when I can't sleep. There is much fun to be had in that mental simulation.

Had Constantine not converted, it's likely Rome would have fallen much sooner than it did. In fact, if you want a steampunk universe, the early fall of Rome would probably be a trigger point.

I was once told that if Rome hadn't fallen, the Crusades would have been televised... That was basically the seed of the idea.

The crusades were a response to Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula and harassment/murder/kidnapping into slavery of Christian Pilgrims headed for the holy land. Had Rome not fallen, it is entirely possible that Islam would never had taken root- the nomadic tribes that first embraced it were simple pagans that found themselves in a power vacuum after the fall of Rome. The presence of a 'Pax Romana' would have been sufficient to quell such ambitions.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Oh, yeah... Definitely. The whole mess between the three main abrahamic faiths and all of the little bits and groups within each of them has been an absolute endless well of conflict for thousands of years.

I've always thought of writing an alternate history of the world, where Rome got its s**t together and Constantine didn't convert... Thus resulting in the abrahamic faiths failing to stick to the wall.

Problem is, I'm not nearly a good enough political scientist, anthropologist, or historian to really make a good enough guess. But it is still a really interesting thought experiment I ponder at night when I can't sleep. There is much fun to be had in that mental simulation.

Judaism would've continued on much as it has, since it pre-dates that by several centuries. Christianity would've flopped, though, or at least not been as big. Seen mostly as a very strange Jewish cult. Muslim, however, would likely have happened pretty much as it did, however, since that branch technically started when Ishmael was kicked out because Abraham was a henpecked husband and his wife was a jealous b*tch. Or at least the seeds for Muslim did. Most likely, Jewish and local cultures would've clashed in a similar fashion.

However, Polytheism would've been much more prevalent in Europe, due to the lack of conversion by the sword. America wouldn't have been colonized by Britain because the Celts weren't really all that great at navigation in blue waters (although the Norse could easily have managed it if they wanted to), meaning the native American tribes might've had a chance to work out their differences and presented a more united front to the Europeans. Who knows where THAT would've lead to.

[Sgt. Howard]

Oh, yeah... Definitely. The whole mess between the three main abrahamic faiths and all of the little bits and groups within each of them has been an absolute endless well of conflict for thousands of years.

I've always thought of writing an alternate history of the world, where Rome got its s**t together and Constantine didn't convert... Thus resulting in the abrahamic faiths failing to stick to the wall.

Problem is, I'm not nearly a good enough political scientist, anthropologist, or historian to really make a good enough guess. But it is still a really interesting thought experiment I ponder at night when I can't sleep. There is much fun to be had in that mental simulation.

Judaism would've continued on much as it has, since it pre-dates that by several centuries. Christianity would've flopped, though, or at least not been as big. Seen mostly as a very strange Jewish cult. Muslim, however, would likely have happened pretty much as it did, however, since that branch technically started when Ishmael was kicked out because Abraham was a henpecked husband and his wife was a jealous b*tch. Or at least the seeds for Muslim did. Most likely, Jewish and local cultures would've clashed in a similar fashion.

However, Polytheism would've been much more prevalent in Europe, due to the lack of conversion by the sword. America wouldn't have been colonized by Britain because the Celts weren't really all that great at navigation in blue waters (although the Norse could easily have managed it if they wanted to), meaning the native American tribes might've had a chance to work out their differences and presented a more united front to the Europeans. Who knows where THAT would've lead to.

In the year 1820, an odd vessel was spotted off the coast of Portugal- not a bulky, top-heavy cog of commerce or stately trireme of the state, but a sleek vessel with lateen sails similar to the Arab Dhow. Her crew ere all of copper hued skin, large nose and piercing dark eyes- most had partially or totally shaved heads. They appraised the coast before them, dropped anchor and rowed a boat to shore. Once there, a leader of their group stepped forward and before an astonished group of locals planted an odd flag and made some grand pronouncement in a language nobody could decipher. Had they been able to understand, they would realize that this party had just declared the Iberian Peninsula in the name of the Iroquois nation...

[FreeFlier]

Oh, yeah... Definitely. The whole mess between the three main abrahamic faiths and all of the little bits and groups within each of them has been an absolute endless well of conflict for thousands of years.

I've always thought of writing an alternate history of the world, where Rome got its s**t together and Constantine didn't convert... Thus resulting in the abrahamic faiths failing to stick to the wall.

Problem is, I'm not nearly a good enough political scientist, anthropologist, or historian to really make a good enough guess. But it is still a really interesting thought experiment I ponder at night when I can't sleep. There is much fun to be had in that mental simulation.

Judaism would've continued on much as it has, since it pre-dates that by several centuries. Christianity would've flopped, though, or at least not been as big. Seen mostly as a very strange Jewish cult. Muslim, however, would likely have happened pretty much as it did, however, since that branch technically started when Ishmael was kicked out because Abraham was a henpecked husband and his wife was a jealous b*tch. Or at least the seeds for Muslim did. Most likely, Jewish and local cultures would've clashed in a similar fashion.

However, Polytheism would've been much more prevalent in Europe, due to the lack of conversion by the sword. America wouldn't have been colonized by Britain because the Celts weren't really all that great at navigation in blue waters (although the Norse could easily have managed it if they wanted to), meaning the native American tribes might've had a chance to work out their differences and presented a more united front to the Europeans. Who knows where THAT would've lead to.

In the year 1820, an odd vessel was spotted off the coast of Portugal- not a bulky, top-heavy cog of commerce or stately trireme of the state, but a sleek vessel with lateen sails similar to the Arab Dhow. Her crew ere all of copper hued skin, large nose and piercing dark eyes- most had partially or totally shaved heads. They appraised the coast before them, dropped anchor and rowed a boat to shore. Once there, a leader of their group stepped forward and before an astonished group of locals planted an odd flag and made some grand pronouncement in a language nobody could decipher. Had they been able to understand, they would realize that this party had just declared the Iberian Peninsula in the name of the Iroquois nation...

I've read some things that indicate that even that would have resulted in the destruction of the american cultures . . . by disease.

Native americans were mostly troubled by parasites . . . europeans by disease. in the Columbian Exchange, the only real disease to come out of the Americas and spread in Europe was syphilis . . . maybe. The record is unclear.

Old-world diseases known to have made the crossing include, among others, smallpox, yellow fever and malaria (the record is unclear on plague). The result were virgin-field epidemics . . . Some estimates say that 95% of native americans -nearly one-third of the humans alive on earth in 1491- died by 1600 . . . the europeans moved into a power vacuum created by megadeaths.

--FreeFlier

[Thor]

Native americans were mostly troubled by parasites . . . europeans by disease. in the Columbian Exchange, the only real disease to come out of the Americas and spread in Europe was syphilis . . . maybe. The record is unclear.

Old-world diseases known to have made the crossing include, among others, smallpox, yellow fever and malaria (the record is unclear on plague). The result were virgin-field epidemics . . . Some estimates say that 95% of native americans -nearly one-third of the humans alive on earth in 1491- died by 1600 . . . the europeans moved into a power vacuum created by megadeaths.

For an interesting and concise explanation of why a parallel plague did not cross the Atlantic the other way, I present this video.

[Warrl]

Oh, yeah... Definitely. The whole mess between the three main abrahamic faiths and all of the little bits and groups within each of them has been an absolute endless well of conflict for thousands of years.

I've always thought of writing an alternate history of the world, where Rome got its s**t together and Constantine didn't convert... Thus resulting in the abrahamic faiths failing to stick to the wall.

Problem is, I'm not nearly a good enough political scientist, anthropologist, or historian to really make a good enough guess. But it is still a really interesting thought experiment I ponder at night when I can't sleep. There is much fun to be had in that mental simulation.

Judaism would've continued on much as it has, since it pre-dates that by several centuries. Christianity would've flopped, though, or at least not been as big. Seen mostly as a very strange Jewish cult. Muslim, however, would likely have happened pretty much as it did, however, since that branch technically started when Ishmael was kicked out because Abraham was a henpecked husband and his wife was a jealous b*tch. Or at least the seeds for Muslim did. Most likely, Jewish and local cultures would've clashed in a similar fashion.

At the time Islam arose, the Eastern Roman and Persian empires - which, jointly with the Indian Ocean, completely surrounded Arabia - had recently ended a long, bloody, expensive, and pretty much indecisive war; they were exhausted militarily and financially.

If the Western Roman Empire had still been a meaningful force at all, and at the Eastern Roman Empire's back, that war would likely have gone much differently, and the emerging Muslim force would probably have been crushed followed by the conquest of parts of Arabia that those empires had never bothered with before.

But, going further back... there really aren't many strictly-monotheistic religions. One can argue whether the Jews got the idea from Pharaoh Akhenaten, or vice versa, but it doesn't really matter: in Egypt, that ruler's monotheistic cult did not survive the entire period between his death and his funeral; while the Jewish view of their deity was tribal with no ambition to spread to other nations.

Christianity is the apparent source of the notion that there is a single God who wants the worship of the entire world. (And there are arguments about whether that ambition of universality was part of Christianity as taught by Jesus, or if it originated with Paul, or if it was an even later invention.)

Rome spread the followers of this odd little Jewish sect across Europe, northern Africa, and much of the Middle East, and then made it the empire's official religion which gave it great weight.

A rebellious Persian province invented a monotheistic religion hoping to get a bit of support from Rome/Constantinople, and - in spite of not getting much - managed to take over Persia and spread their religion across that empire.

The Arabs would have gotten the idea of a universal, monotheistic religion from either the Romans (or Byzantines) or the Persians. Possibly both.

What is Islam without that idea?

[GlytchMeister]

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, chaos theory. Some guy said there was a God that wanted the whole world.

That idea, and the fact that it actually took root, shaped the world.

[Gyrrakavian]

On the note of the Crusades, here's an interesting little mini-series that should only take about an hour & a half to watch.
Europe : The First Crusade - I: The People's Crusade - Extra History
Europe: The First Crusade - II: Peter the Hermit - Extra History
Europe: The First Crusade - III: A Good Crusade? - Extra History
Europe: The First Crusade - IV: Men of Iron - Extra History
Europe: The First Crusade - V: Siege of Antioch - Extra History
Europe: The First Crusade - VI: On to Jerusalem - Extra History
Europe: The First Crusade - Lies (corrections) - Extra History

And there's two related episodes
Middle East: Odenathus - Ghosts of the Desert - Extra History
Middle East: Palmyra Today - Afterword - Extra History

And they've done a bunch of other history mini-series, too.

[DinkyInky]

On the note of the Crusades, here's an interesting little mini-series that should only take about an hour & a half to watch.
Europe : The First Crusade - I: The People's Crusade - Extra History
Europe: The First Crusade - II: Peter the Hermit - Extra History
Europe: The First Crusade - III: A Good Crusade? - Extra History
Europe: The First Crusade - IV: Men of Iron - Extra History
Europe: The First Crusade - V: Siege of Antioch - Extra History
Europe: The First Crusade - VI: On to Jerusalem - Extra History
Europe: The First Crusade - Lies (corrections) - Extra History

And there's two related episodes
Middle East: Odenathus - Ghosts of the Desert - Extra History
Middle East: Palmyra Today - Afterword - Extra History

And they've done a bunch of other history mini-series, too.

Now if only that Khan academy thingy they got leads to dvd's distributed in the classrooms. I know many kids would watch these and actually learn things, versus the way it's happening now.

[Gyrrakavian]

I haven't heard of Khan academy, but I definitely agree kids would watch these and learn from them.

They just got done with one on John Snow and the Broad Street pump during the cholera outbreaks in London. Next they'll do one on Mary Seacole, in keeping with the cholera theme. Then, they're going to return to the story of Emperor Justinian and Theodora.

[Catawampus]

As to "interesting things to happen nowaday"... I've heard it opined that most of today's conflicts in the Middle East - specifically, the very bloody Sunni / Shia disputes - can be traced back very directly to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire roughly a century ago, and then for many more centuries going back from there. Both Christianity and Islam were internally fractured, almost from the moments of their births, and a lot of those fractures were and are thoroughly bloody.

Yeah, Islam got split up rather seriously right after Mohammed died and they had to decide on his successor. The Sunnis got the upper hand pretty early on, though. The strong central governments such as the Ottoman Empire and some of its predecessors helped keep things under control because internal strife is bad for business. Also, they were able to keep conditions fairly good at home: people are less liable to run around wrecking things when they're comfortable and contented. When the Ottoman Empire fell apart, though, not much happened. The Muslims were mostly then being kept under European colonialism, and were able to more-or-less unify in opposition to that. It's after Islamic nationalism actually succeeded and all of the small independent nations were able to form in the decades after the Second World War that widespread official violent intraIslam fratricide started to really take off. Weak rulers weren't able to keep things calm, strong rulers found it convenient to play off the different sides against each other, and the economic shambles after years of foreign powers doing whatever they pleased with the local resources left people very dissatisfied.

The crusades were a response to Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula and harassment/murder/kidnapping into slavery of Christian Pilgrims headed for the holy land.

That was Urban's big emotional excuse, at least, though it's pretty much certain that he exaggerated things a tad. Political and economic problems would have been more pressing: control of trade routes in and to the Mediterranean, attempts at restoring bonds between Eastern and Western branches of Christianity, the horrible mess that feudalism and its inheritance laws left its upper classes in where the only way that they could support themselves was by constant fighting, and so on.

Had Rome not fallen, it is entirely possible that Islam would never had taken root- the nomadic tribes that first embraced it were simple pagans that found themselves in a power vacuum after the fall of Rome. The presence of a 'Pax Romana' would have been sufficient to quell such ambitions.

Arabia where Islam sprang up was never really in the direct influence of any of the major powers of the time. Whether a united Roman empire or the fragmented one, neither would have likely had any on-site control over what happened in Mecca and Medina. So Islam would have started up and flourished locally. . .assuming that Mohammed was born and so on. What would possibly have been harder would have been the expansion later on. I don't see any particular reason why a Sasanian Empire weakened by fighting with a unified Roman Empire would have been any harder for the Muslims to overthrow than the one weakened by the Byzantine Empire was. But perhaps the conquest of the Holy Land and such would have been harder. Don't forget that the easrly Muslims did manage to chase the Byzantines out of much of their territory, and the Byzantine Empire wasn't exactly a pushover at the time. There's no guarantee that a strong Rome would have done much better. Rome and Persian Empire had pretty much the same relationship that Constantinople and Persia did, with pretty much the same resources in play, so would have probably been in similar situations in the mid and late 7th Century.

For an interesting and concise explanation of why a parallel plague did not cross the Atlantic the other way, I present this video.

Though from what I've seen of genetic and population studies, even if there had been more cities and domesticated animals in the New World, the exchange of diseases would have been somewhat lopsided in the same way. It seems that the lack of genetic diversity caused by the small number of people who crossed into the Americas fifteen-thousand years ago left the population of the Americas in 1492 with a much smaller toolkit of antibody making cells. The Europeans had a more adaptable immune system. So the poor natives were out of luck pretty much no matter what, unless I suppose they were invaded by the Australian Aborigines instead of by Europeans.

[jwhouk]

Rome never really knew what to do with the Middle East.

[Alkarii]

and it's because of that right there that we instinctively abhor incest.

Edit: gah! Post sniped! But now it seems funnier

[Catawampus]

Rome never really knew what to do with the Middle East.

I don't think that they ever really intended to have it in the first place. It just sort of happened to them. Various opportunistic alliances turned into more involved support which turned into more direct administration. . .by the time the Republic turned into the Empire, they found themselves saddled with a whole mess of little feuding polities that they couldn't easily extricate themselves from.

and it's because of that right there that we instinctively abhor incest.

Yeah: have sex with your close relatives and you might end up in charge of the Middle East. Who'd want that? Makes perfectly logical sense to me!

[Alkarii]

yeah, I'd have quoted the last part of the post right before it, except I'm using a flip phone to post, and I don't like doing the wall o' text if I can avoid it. Problem is, I didn't want to spend a half hour or more hitting the delete button. Holding it down would have cleared everything.

[FreeFlier]

and it's because of that right there that we instinctively abhor incest.

It's not instinctive, it's culturally implanted.

We spend our entire lives being taught incest is wrong.

This is, BTW, a recent development . . . until the last century or so most people wound up marrying distant relatives because there weren't any other available candidates! When you live in a hamlet or 50 people and have never been more than 15 miles from it, the pool of available potential mates is very small.

--FreeFlier

[GlytchMeister]

and it's because of that right there that we instinctively abhor incest.

It's not instinctive, it's culturally implanted.

We spend our entire lives being taught incest is wrong.

This is, BTW, a recent development . . . until the last century or so most people wound up marrying distant relatives because there weren't any other available candidates! When you live in a hamlet or 50 people and have never been more than 15 miles from it, the pool of available potential mates is very small.

--FreeFlier

From what I've heard, there is a physiological aversion reaction when a potential mate has a similar musk to a close relative. Musk is determined by what bacteria can survive in the stinky places on a person, and that is determined, IIRC, at least partially by the immune system.

Also, you kinda argued yourself into a hole, there, FreeFlier. Back in the day, marriage was much more of a political and economic venture than lurve. And when a marriage wasn't arranged, it was done simply by expediency. As you said, a hamlet of fifty people doesn't exactly offer a multitude of choices for marriage.

Weighed against each other, the biological imperatives that drive the production of offspring, any offspring, outweigh the aversion to mating with a relative. After all, something is better than nothing, in terms of the survival of the species... Even if that something has seven toes on each foot, is four feet tall, and has a thick beard even if it's female.