Recent content by ray243

There's certainly the financial element. But the timing of the invasions aren't often decided by money alone.

If you completely erase the history of Alexander the Great from Roman's cultural memory. Roman society is not dominated by strategic, cold-hard logical thoughts. Their entire way of thinking is different from how modern societies think and operates. Instead, the Roman society is dominated by the...

That tend to be a rather dangerous mistake to make about the history of the Roman empire. It's why I don't recommend Gibbon as a good source. If you start with the assumption that everything declined from the Julian and Flavian period, you're ignoring all the changes that happened and how the...

That's the root of your assumption right there. You assume that things were falling apart for the empire by the time of Constantine, when there's an entire academic field dedicated to challenging those assumptions (see Late Antiquity). Even some of the people that argues the empire collapsed did...

There's nothing stopping anyone from writing an ASB timeline. It's when people assume their timeline and basic assumption is historically accurate or well-researched that you'll run into problems.

It doesn't make a difference. It seems Atamolos is assuming the Roman senate did not expand to include provincials. It did. There's no difference between the Romans and the Byzantine. Every culture is building off technology of previous cultures. It's like saying architecture in the middle...

That's your problem right there. Gibbon is extremely outdated and many of his views are just downright wrong. What makes you think the Roman senate did not recruit people from the provinces? Again, if you want to write a realistic scenario, your reading needs to go beyond Gibbon and move away...

Actually, recent scholarship have revised that opinion.

Proving it is different from believing in it. Think about it as theoretical physics vs proven theorem. For example Steven Hawking's theories are mathematically valid, and have sufficient grounds to believe this is likely to be true. This does not mean it's proven by a scientific experiment. Even...

The school at Nisibis seem to have a formal structure and hierarchy. They have ranks like mhaggyānā (Elementary Instructor), maqryānā (Reader: Intermediate Studies) , bādoqā (Instructor: no clear what's the exact role of this rank), mphashshqānā (Exegete: Dean of the school) and rabbaytā...

He's distinguishing college from University. College in the UK can refer to six-form colleges, which are essentially high-schools. So his teacher at his college can simply be someone that graduated with a Bachelor from Oxford. So I don't think the teacher in particular is well exposed to Eastern...

If you are looking for a school that has a more formal hierarchy, look at the School of Nisibis.

Formal in what sense? I suppose the Auditoria on Kom el-Dikka have to be formal in some sense, because it's very much a centrally planned building project rather than a bunch of different buildings converging into one. There's also the attempt by Cassiodorus to build a Christian university in Rome.

In what sense? Most late antique/medieval universities are often subject to the influence of local government (or church) because they are the ones with the money to pay for buildings and etc, or salary for professors. If anything, the Theodosian Code suggest the Romans in Constantinople were...

I thought it might be useful to have a thread that tries to clear up some popular misconception about pre-modern civilisations. People are free to add nuggets of information to this thread, and hopefully this will clear up some misunderstanding people might get from pop history books/historical...