General Chit-Chat Thread: A New Beginning

[Chris]

Also here's a crazy image from Wikipedia showing the scope of Egypt, a timeline of the great wonders. The great pyramid is the oldest and the only still standing

Spoiler

 

[Chris]

For what it's worth I think Samaritanism might be the older between it and Rabbinic Judaism

idk enough about early history yet to join in on this, seems plausible to me tho

 

[Chris]

If we would have taken better note of oral tradition and not turned out nose at it when we started writing we'd have so much more good stuff. Look at like the Maori stuff, all oral legend but quite a bit can be used to reasonably fill in archeological blanks

 

[Chris]

I'm not opposed and enjoy reading through biases, it doesn't mean you can't get great info from it. Oral legends are just extra biased

 

[Comrade Khan]

Outside the dates n locations there's always a lil buss anyways or at least a pov

 

[Comrade Khan]

N having extra context of said bias is great in must cases like u said u get great info still

 

[Chris]

Lol yeah I was recently listening to a podcast about Caesar's war with Gaul and the only source really is Caesar himself so the whole thing was talking about how biased he may or may not be

 

[Grim]

With regards to Caesar's commentaries, I largely believe what he writes even if he puts his own spin on things

 

[Grim]

I think the big thing that people kind of miss is that the Romans liked details no matter how trivial, and Caesar puts SO MANY trivial details about his whole campaign that for the most part you kind of just have to take him at his word.

 

[Grim]

Like I'm outright sure he fudged the numbers on some battles but the details of *what* happened I tend to believe.

 

[Chris]

The numbers are guesses at best, throw out the hard ones and only look at the ratios

 

[Chris]

And his reasons of "why" are just his, don't take it at fact but otherwise, great resource

 

[Grim]

This probably isn't a hot take either, but Caesar was 100% in the right to March on Rome, Cato, Pompey, and the Optimates were who really caused the Civil War.

 

[Chris]

I think the big thing that people kind of miss is that the Romans liked details no matter how trivial, and Caesar puts SO MANY trivial details about his whole campaign that for the most part you kind of just have to take him at his word.

sometimes he leaves out major details while putting such trivial ones in that it's fascinating in his own right that he thought readers cared more about A over B

 

[Chris]

And bc they probably did at the time, but it's not what we care as much about now. A mental thought exercise is imagining our current world 1000 years from now and those priorities