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The Language of the Roman Empire

186 points by diodorus 8y ago

fosk 8y ago
It’s incredible to realize how foundational the Roman Empire was to what we now commonly consider Western civilization. Rome certainly was a highly advanced society in its time, but what a shame to think that because of vast abundance of slaves the Roman society never pushed further with technological innovations, effectively preventing the human race from having mobile phones by the year 1000, if not earlier. Some argue that with less slaves an industrial revolution might have triggered much earlier, and Roman society was certainly ingenious enough to push the boundaries if there ever was a need to do so.
- steve19 8y ago
  Very interesting idea. But I am not sure the Roman's could have skipped 1,000 of slow technological progress. I would say we might have reached mobile phones a little earlier if the Mongels had not laid waste to a lot of the world's population, specifically the very scientifically advanced Islamic world. But even then, how much could we have skipped? The Roman's would probably never have had any desire to explore the sea leading to the invention of the naval chronometer, and all the important advances that brought about (edit: towards the end they could barely manage the land empire they had, and they were not seafarers)
  - loggedinmyphone 8y ago
    Islamic civilization was never very curious about the outside world other than militarily. There is a famous story about Galileo's telescopes being sent as a gift to a Muslim ruler to observe the planets. They didn't see any point in this but were excited about being able to use them to spot and attack other ships. Islamic culture did preserve some of the old Greek scholarship, but real science didn't get started until after their Golden age was past.
    - fsloth 8y ago
      There were excellent scholars in the early Islamic culture (700 - 1000) before the religious dogmatists started dominating the intellectual sphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Kindi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Kindi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicenna Etc. We who've read our history form western sources just aren't generally aware of them because we usually write the names of the most famous ones in latin form (e.g. Avicenna).
      - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
        Was it in Islamic or, was it in Middle-Eastern culture? What particularly about Islam, or the particular individuals faith/religious practice made their science a part of religious development? It's fascinating to see the interplay of science from different geographies - that Al-Kindi started by learning and translating Greek science and then that we primarily know him through others translation of his works to Latin. Al-Kwarizmi is a well known name in the West from the same Persian scientific community (I think he was perhaps head of the House of Wisdom whilst Al-Kindi was there).
        Cyph0n 8y ago
        It is referred to as Islamic science because: a) Scientists came from a wide variety of backgrounds, but were usually of Muslim faith. For example, the term "Middle East" would not be accurate since many scholars were Persian and West Asian. b) Scholars were typically funded by patrons who were associated with the Muslim empire/caliphate. c) To a lesser extent, many of the prominent scholars first learned Islamic science and philosophy -- typically at a young age -- before delving into the natural sciences.
        pbhjpbhj 8y ago
        It's interesting we don't [in the UK nor in English language sources online] refer to the likes of Kepler as being part of Christian science, despite the characters often being trained priests in one denomination or another [Copernicus, say, was a doctor of canon law], often being funded by Church patrons. There's an interesting divergence in the perceptions; I'm interested in whether that's a modern issue or if it represents something inherent in the mode of the science being performed? Wikipedia mentions scientists who were historically - and are elsewhere - known for their Christian faith, priests and such but without mentioning that they were Christian believers but with scientists who were living in Islamic countries [I don't know the history to know if they, for example were Imams or wrote religious treatise] they're flagged as Muslims. Copernicus/Kepler/Brahe [I didn't check further] aren't claimed to be Christian, Al-Kindi is claimed in the first sentence as a Muslim amongst Muslim scholars, in a Muslim World, etc.. Any input on historic differences, IYO, that lead to these different characterisations?
- muro 8y ago
  The number of slaves steadily decreased as the Rome stopped expanding. Additionally, by the time Rome turned into an empire, freeing of slaves became a show of magnanimousity and so frequent, Augustus (= around 0AD) had to put extra laws limiting it. Thus, the Roman empire had a shortage of slaves and couldn't just "count on the slaves" for everything.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I think the biggest reason was the fall of the imperial. Outside what is now known Italy, many Roman outposts only had a glimpse of Roman technology and as they got conquered by their enemies, everything got destroyed and the knowledge was lost in that part of Europe. It is impressive to read books like Herodotus and realizing Greek students that could afford it where doing "internships" in Egypt, where the idea of specialized doctors was already a thing.
- simonh 8y ago
  Most of Rome's engineering achievements were not performed using slave labour though. They were largely executed by the army. Slaves worked in plantations and mines, but tended to die out after a generation because slaves having babies and raising children were unproductive, so the slave economy relied on a constant influx of new slaves from conquests. Once the Empire largely stabilised it's borders, the supply lines ran dry and the population of slaves dwindled away. The idea of a Dark Ages is largely a north-western European one because we got largely cut off from Rome for a few centuries. In Italy and France, and especially in the Byzantine Empire there was no Dark Age. Technological progress didn't stop and slavery was no longer a major sociological or economic factor.
  - loggedinmyphone 8y ago
    There was a Byzantine Dark Age in the 7th and 8th Centuries where perfume lived under the rubble of previous cities hiding from Arabic and other invaders. The Roman aqueducts went into disrepair and people went back to drinking from wells. There was a major population collapse. They did make some cool devices though like clocks and mechanical lions, as well as Greek fire. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2016/06/the-byzantine-dark-ages http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2016/06/the-byzant...
    - simonh 8y ago
      I wasn't aware of that, thanks!
  - fsloth 8y ago
    "slavery was no longer a major sociological or economic factor." Slavery was still an important economic factor in the early middle ages ("Dark ages"). "By ...(741–752), Venice had established a thriving slave trade, buying in Italy, and selling to the Moors in Northern Africa. .. Caravans of slaves traveled from Eastern Europe, through Alpine passes in Austria, to reach Venice." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_medieval_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_medieval_Europe
    - 8y ago
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Rome certainly was a highly advanced society in its time, but what a shame to think that because of vast abundance of slaves the Roman society never pushed further with technological innovations, effectively preventing the human race from having mobile phones by the year 1000, if not earlier. Thank god for that!
- fsloth 8y ago
  I don't think there are that many examples of roman technical innovations or scientific development. They were ultimately practical, but not overtly imaginative. They adapted, what they found practical, and could scale up what worked due to their organizational skill. I think the main impediment to progress in the ancient world was the tendency not to share discoveries but to keep them secret. No patents, but your schoolmates will kill you if you share the discoveries taught to you. Academies were not universities - more like a dude with a few disciples. If your disciples just don't get your invention it will just be forgotten. I'm sure greek went past Euclid in all sort of ways but we just never heard from them.
- loggedinmyphone 8y ago
  Rome had slaves but it wasn't the cornerstone of their economy. The idea that the life in each generation should be more advanced and efficient than in the previous simply hadn't been invented then.
  - Balero 8y ago
    Slaves were the cornerstone of the Roman economy, especially between 100bce and 100ce. The impact of all of the slaves from the conquest of Gaul was what Ceaser used as a platform for his politics. You are right on your second point. There was an account of a person coming up with a labour saving device for cleaning streets. However they were not allowed to use it as it was taking needed jobs away from people in the city.
- fsloth 8y ago
  Industrialism had lot of preconditions that had to be in place. The late 18th century europe was much more complex and developed place than the roman empire ever was in several ways. 1. Science (had been picking up steam for a few centuries) 2. Capital (wealth from the colonies had been piling up for centuries as well) 3. Public demand for goods (you're not just selling to the prince, you are selling to everyone). 4. Several countries with legal systems and professional courts that upheld the law and facilitated binding legal agreements. 5. Political system that did not overrule the courts just because the king needed a bit more money After these preconditions were in place, I think one of the triggers in the industrialized age was the expanding market demand for goods. If the demand is low, there is very little incentive to move beyond human artisanal labour (ahem, artisanal mining, ahem).
  - Retric 8y ago
    The largest factor was simply population size largely from gradual improvements in farming. Global population in year zero was estimated at 200-300 million. That jumpted to 700-800 million in 1700 and 900M to 1 billion in 1800. Sure the city of Rome hit 1 million people early, but that took an empire to sustain. At the start of the industrial revolution several cities where about that large. PS: The Roman Empire covered a lot of land, but it's population was somwere between modern day South Korea and Germany. And all that distance dramatically slowed down communication.
    - fsloth 8y ago
      6. Development of more productive and less labour intensive agricultural methods which increased population and released labour to other endevours. :) Thanks for the reminder!
- tuomosipola 8y ago
  Classical antiquity, along with Judaeo-Christian tradition and the Enlightenment, form the foundation for the Western civilization. You could throw in others but those three are the big ones, I think. The Greeks and the Romans have had a huge influence on what we have become.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  I think in the long view we are either still in or have just recently left the first era of human civilization, so it isn't surprising that there would be echoes of an early empire. The demarcation can be technical or social (How long has it been that we've had a shared global knowledge of history? That's a significant transition.).
- enitihas 8y ago
  Just curious, was Rome even at its peak bigger than the contemporary Chinese empire? Now if only the Chinese empire wasn't so self sufficient.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    not really. in 117 AD, the roman empire controlled about half the total area of contemporary china (5 million km^2 vs 9.6 million km^2). the estimated population at this time was 70 million, two orders of magnitude off china's 1.4 billion today. the only way you could consider rome to have been "bigger" is to consider what fraction of the world's population fell within its borders. about 21% of the world's population lived in the roman empire versus china's 18.4% share today. [1][2] edit: or did you mean china contemporary to rome haha? most relevant figures are for the han dynasty. area was 6.5 million km^2 in 100 AD, and population was 57.6 million in 2 AD, making the two empires roughly comparable in size. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_dynasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_dynasty
- lkrubner 8y ago
  Slavery overlaps with the Industrial Revolution by at least 100 years, and even longer in the colonies, such as India and Kenya. The resources needed for industrialism were dug up by slaves. It is tough to make the case that slavery impeded industrialism, when there are many cases where slavery seems to have helped industrialism. I think its best to look elsewhere for the roots of industrialism. Descartes and Newton helped form certain intellectual foundations, and the willingness of English peasants to fight and die for their religious beliefs lead to the end of the witch burning and heresy trials. That's important because a few years later Jethro Tull and Charles Townshend begin the Agricultural Revolution. Jethro Tull was 26 years old when he started working on his machines, in 1701. He was not necessarily smarter than all previous farmers, but he belonged to the first generation in history that had a guarantee that they could violate tradition and they would not be burned at the stake for it.
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    > It is tough to make the case that slavery impeded industrialism Compare the free states of the Union vs the slave states of the Confederacy. The free states rapidly industrialized from 1800-1860, the slave states did not and pretty much did not advance economically at all.
    - Sangermaine 8y ago
      If you read about the economics of this period you'll find that, as with most of history, the reality isn't this simple. A lot of Southern capital went into financing Northern industry, for example. It's difficult to neatly divide the nation's economy in this way as if they were two separate spheres, as much they as they may have want to think of themselves that way.
      - WalterBright 8y ago
        Not one southern city industrialized. Investors tend to invest in things they know about and can keep an eye on, which tends to be local. Investment capital uniformly fleeing the slave states to the free ones suggests that investing in slave states was a bad investment. In those days, different states were like different countries today.
- Zardoz84 8y ago
  You could get a big surprise if you think that the romans get stagnated about technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_technology#Technologies_developed_or_invented_by_the_Romans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_technology#Technologies_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mill http://www.waterhistory.org/histories/barbegal/ http://www.waterhistory.org/histories/barbegal/ What pushed or stagnated tech development not was slavery. What push us quickly since the modern age, was the free movement of ideas and knowledge (thanks to the printing press and paper making the books affordable) and the scientific method.
- nradov 8y ago
  You might enjoy the alternate history novel "Kingdom of the Wicked" by Helen Dale. It takes place in the Roman Empire where the industrial revolution arrived 2000 years early partly due to abolishing slavery. https://www.ligatu.re/book/rules/ https://www.ligatu.re/book/rules/
- WalterBright 8y ago
  Foundational as well is the printing press. Rome didn't have one, and perhaps went as far as it could without it. While the printing press is probably required for industrialization, it is not sufficient. Your point about slavery holding it back is a good one.
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    Further support for this notion comes from the fact that in the southern US slave states, it was illegal to teach the slaves to read. It would be pretty hard to industrialize when the workforce is forcibly kept ignorant.
  - Balgair 8y ago
    Part of what made the printing press work was the metallurgy required. You needed quality iron and steel for the screws and the typefaces, brass and bronze would not endure the stresses. Those metallurgic advancements largely came out of war and the need for metals that could handle black-powder explosions.
    - WalterBright 8y ago
      Even Gutenberg's primitive press, which was built out of a wooden wine press, was revolutionary. It used cast lead type. The Romans had lead technology.
      - Balgair 8y ago
        Thanks for the clarification!
- VLM 8y ago
  Not slavery so much. As with many large scale trends there are many large scale reasons. Massive income and wealth inequality kicked in around a hundred BC or so and poverty prevents a mass production consumer economy so right there you're limited to mass production of industrial goods, meanwhile if you have millions of times the wealth of a peasant there's nothing to spend the money on so you don't care about 0.1% rate of return vs 10% rate of return if there's not enough cool stuff to spend even 0.001% rate of return on. Their financial capital markets, nascent as they were, were essentially non-functional. If you know how to make a nationwide railroad, thats nice, but theres simply no way to finance it. There were no business/financial paths to wealth and anyone who became wealthy or powerful via trade was noteworthy and extremely rare; essentially all the people with money got it by sophistry or military skill, not by being intelligent stewards of their wealth, so expecting intelligent investment is overly optimistic. (edited in, lack of existing transport infrastructure means no commodities market, so flooding the local tin market just means you sell more tin for the same total revenue...) So in England at the start of the industrial revolution you had professional-ish mine managers who saw their only way to squeeze out that next percent of revenue was crazy coal powered steam engine water pumps... If a tin mine owning Roman wanted more tin, he'd just take over another province with some legions or legally wheel and deal his way into stealing a mine from a fellow Roman. Later on Diocletian codified central economic control, communist style, see the link. If you could make a steam locomotive engine, thats nice, but it would be illegal for anyone to work for you, especially the skilled craftsmen you'd need to assemble your locomotive. Have a small economic collapse now, or patch over things to produce a much bigger one later. Guess what option we selected this century for the last couple decades, LOL, the future for us is going to be almost as exciting as the Romans declining years... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian#Social_and_professional_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian#Social_and_professi... Making a handwavy argument their civilization had reached and exceeded the scaling limit of an operational empire even for the most skilled emperors, and of course most emperors were not skilled. The point of that is increasing complexity increases fragility; a ridiculously complex economy based on silicon refined semiconductor computer technology would have collapsed much sooner, not later, and certainly not result in mobile phones in 1000 AD or whatever. If you thought Aurelian had problems with currency reform, imagine if that poor bastard had additional challenges of fractional reserve banking, high frequency trading, derivatives markets, financial alchemy such as mortgage based securities, if he had to put up with all that the poor guy would never have even tried...
jerry40 8y ago
Wow, the Oscan language had the letter "Я". I thought it exists in cyrillic alphabets only. I know they are different letters having (perhaps) different pronunciation but still. Interesting!
- ithkuil 8y ago
  It's very common for writing systems of that time to mirror the letters when switching write direction. In some cases text used to be written as boustrophedon, i.e. switching direction each line (like an ox plowing a field). Early Greek thus had not a fixed direction and derivative alphabets such as the Etruscan have settled to one direction of text flow and of letter shapes at random, namely right to left. Latin has "forked" from the Greek alphabet at another point in time and thus has reversed direction of writing and reverse glyphs with respect to Etruscan and Oscan
  - jerry40 8y ago
    Thanks for the explanation! Mirroring the letters is very unusial concept for me. I've tried to write down a mirrored word and it was not very difficult actually. It is definitely readable.
    - saalweachter 8y ago
      Yeah, people talk about Da Vinci writing backwards as a "code" but it's an easy trick if you want to write left-handed without smearing your ink (which was even worse with older inks with longer drying times). Our brains do really well with mirroring operations, especially if you switch hands when mirroring.
      - John_KZ 8y ago
        I've noticed this too, I think it has something to do with the fact that the two hands are "mirrored" in a sense, and operations like opening/closing arms are identical except for mirroring. Who knows, maybe they're even encoded like this somewhere in the brain. After getting used to it it's not that hard to write mirrored text with the opposite hand. It's definitely a lot easier than doing it with the dominant one.
artificial 8y ago
Patrick Wyman has a great podcast on the fall of Rome (among others) and spends some time talking about the impact of regional dialects and the slow process of how those became romance foundations. Really neat stuff!
viach 8y ago
This weird feeling, when I try to read ancient greek words on these pictures, it feels like just a broken cyrillic. Like seeing a newspaper, just a very old one...
- tomcooks 8y ago
  Well cyrillic is indeed old greek + gliphs for slavic sounds, created by sains Cyril and Metodius
  - dbuxton 8y ago
    Interestingly there's a pretty good argument that Cyril and Methodius didn't create Cyrillic at all but instead were the creators of Glagolitic, a now-more-or-less-extinct script that was developed in what's now (roughly) the Czech Republic and was used in Croatia until the 20th Century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script Exactly how Cyril got credit for the script he didn't invent is unclear.
  - Koshkin 8y ago
    With 'Ш' taken from Aramaic/Hebrew.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >when I try to read ancient greek words on these pictures, it feels like just a broken cyrillic Well, cyrillic and the earlier glagolitic was created by some byzantine Greeks and based on the Greek alphabet, so that's not that weird...
  - viach 8y ago
    Right, I know, but it's still feels unusual, like adding some level of reality to these ancient times, making them seem closer. I'm not getting this impression seeing old latin, for example.
    - coldtea 8y ago
tomcooks 8y ago
Fun fact: celtic runes were created on the lakes region by the border between Switzerland and Italy, inspired by Etruscan (coming from Phoenician), probably a Roman invention to get celtic troops to write reports https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Italic_script#Alphabet_of_Lugano https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Italic_script#Alphabet_o...
- dghf 8y ago
  I was going to raise an eyebrow at the use of the word "runes" in that context, but that really does show similarities to futhark.
  - 80386 8y ago
    Futhark is occasionally said to have developed from a variant of Old Italic. Another hypothesis is that it's descended directly from Phoenician: http://www.academia.edu/20097046/Origins_of_runic_writing_A_comparison_of_theories http://www.academia.edu/20097046/Origins_of_runic_writing_A_...
    - tomcooks 8y ago
      Etruscan being a Phoenician derivate I don't understand the difference between the two thesis
      - 80386 8y ago
        Latin and Cyrillic are both descended from Greek, but Latin isn't descended from Cyrillic, nor vice versa. For descent from Phoenician, we should expect that the futhark developed relatively early, and was transmitted to the Proto-Germanic urheimat (almost certainly Denmark) by sea; for descent from Greek or Etruscan, we should expect that it developed relatively late, and may have been transmitted by land. Vennemann's argument in favor of descent of the futhark directly from Phoenician is that there are features preserved by the futhark that were lost by the Old Italic alphabets, and that there are features of the futhark that are best explained by an early date of development. For example, Vennemann considers the ansuz rune to have developed from Phoenician hē; but we'd expect a descendant of hē to represent /e/, not /a/. As it happens, Proto-Germanic ē shifted to ā in the descendant of all Germanic languages but Gothic. In a Greek or Etruscan descent theory, ansuz would likely have developed from some descendant of aleph, since by that time the shift would have already occurred. Unfortunately, hē and aleph are equally plausible as sources for the letterform. And the runes are named by appellative acrophony, like the letters in Phoenician, but unlike the letters in Greek (where the Phoenician names were borrowed as otherwise meaningless lexical units) or Latin (a, be, ce...). If the runes developed from Etruscan, where would appellative acrophony have come from? Then again, Glagolitic also uses appellative acrophony...
jcoffland 8y ago
> But we cannot ignore that the majority of Italia’s coinage was bilingual, suggesting that Latin was already the lingua franca among its multilingual forces. US coinage is bilingual but few Americans speak Latin.
gaytards 8y ago
the fuck is with this click bait.
tuomosipola 8y ago
For those interested I would recommend J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language. Cambridge University Press, 2003. It is more on the linguistic side with many examples in the old languages, but a really interesting book nonetheless.
80386 8y ago
You can tell "rufus" is a loan because it contains medial -f-, and native Latin words don't contain medial -f-, except after prefixes. The only Latin sources for /f/ are Proto-Indo-European bh dh *gʷh in initial position; elsewhere, they generally become /b d v/, in a process that probably paralleled the rhotacism. This sound change wasn't shared by Oscan, Umbrian, or Faliscan -- compare Faliscan "carefo" to Latin "carebo", and Oscan "mefiaí" to Latin "mediae".
- tuomosipola 8y ago
  Weiss's book is full of this kind of stuff. Actually, the whole point of the book is to list. Apparently there will be a new edition this year. Michael Weiss, Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin. Beech Stave Pr Inc (December 31, 2009). http://beechstave.com/weiss.htm http://beechstave.com/weiss.htm
- simonebrunozzi 8y ago
  Your comment is amazing. I am from Umbria, by the way (Assisi), and I felt a bit special when you mentioned this (I know it's silly, but it worked). You seem to know a lot about language and Latin in particular. I studied Latin in school, and I am still a curious reader. Would you have online resources, or books, to recommend for someone like me who'd like to stay up to date with recent research?
cicero 8y ago
The Christian Liturgy in Rome was originally celebrated in Greek and was only later translated into the Latin language, which dominated the Church until modern times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrie#In_Western_Christianity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrie#In_Western_Christianity
ilamont 8y ago
They were written by the last generation of the city who could read and write Oscan: after the Social War, Latin-speaking Roman colonists were sent to settle in Pompeii and many of the other towns of Italy to prevent future rebellions. Along with educational policies favoring the ruling language and other forms of cultural assimilation, the resettlement strategy has been effectively used in modern times, including the United States, China, and the Soviet Union.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
I find it so surprising that Greek was once the language spoken by scarcely educated people in a big part of the ancient world. I am Greek and I can manage koine (I can read it, though I wouldn't be able to, you know, speak it), mostly thanks to my exposure to the new testament when I was young, but I find Latin a much easier language to learn. I guess that's saying something about the ability of humans to learn language at any age, or about the misconceptions we have about what is an "easy" or a "hard" language to learn. Still, I can't shake this feeling that if there was one language that it made sense for so many people to learn so they could easily speak simple things to each other, that should have been Latin, not Greek- the English of the ancient world, not its German.
- baldfat 8y ago
  > I can manage koine (I can read it, though I wouldn't be able to, you know, speak it) We don't really know what Koine Greek sounded like but it certainly doesn't sound anything close to modern Greek. Having several years of academic Koine Greek and Classical Greek I am almost able to make out quite a bit of modern Greek. I swear modern Greek and Konie are closer then Shakespeare and modern English. Classical Greek possibly how it sounded - https://www.npr.org/2016/08/25/491389975/the-sound-of-ancient-greek-in-the-illiad https://www.npr.org/2016/08/25/491389975/the-sound-of-ancien... In Seminary we talked about the tonality of the language but we lost all that. Chinese for example is tonal.

186 points by diodorus 8y ago

fosk 8y ago

It’s incredible to realize how foundational the Roman Empire was to what we now commonly consider Western civilization. Rome certainly was a highly advanced society in its time, but what a shame to think that because of vast abundance of slaves the Roman society never pushed further with technological innovations, effectively preventing the human race from having mobile phones by the year 1000, if not earlier. Some argue that with less slaves an industrial revolution might have triggered much earlier, and Roman society was certainly ingenious enough to push the boundaries if there ever was a need to do so.

steve19 8y ago
Very interesting idea. But I am not sure the Roman's could have skipped 1,000 of slow technological progress. I would say we might have reached mobile phones a little earlier if the Mongels had not laid waste to a lot of the world's population, specifically the very scientifically advanced Islamic world. But even then, how much could we have skipped? The Roman's would probably never have had any desire to explore the sea leading to the invention of the naval chronometer, and all the important advances that brought about (edit: towards the end they could barely manage the land empire they had, and they were not seafarers)
- loggedinmyphone 8y ago
  Islamic civilization was never very curious about the outside world other than militarily. There is a famous story about Galileo's telescopes being sent as a gift to a Muslim ruler to observe the planets. They didn't see any point in this but were excited about being able to use them to spot and attack other ships. Islamic culture did preserve some of the old Greek scholarship, but real science didn't get started until after their Golden age was past.
  - fsloth 8y ago
    There were excellent scholars in the early Islamic culture (700 - 1000) before the religious dogmatists started dominating the intellectual sphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Kindi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Kindi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicenna Etc. We who've read our history form western sources just aren't generally aware of them because we usually write the names of the most famous ones in latin form (e.g. Avicenna).
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      Was it in Islamic or, was it in Middle-Eastern culture? What particularly about Islam, or the particular individuals faith/religious practice made their science a part of religious development? It's fascinating to see the interplay of science from different geographies - that Al-Kindi started by learning and translating Greek science and then that we primarily know him through others translation of his works to Latin. Al-Kwarizmi is a well known name in the West from the same Persian scientific community (I think he was perhaps head of the House of Wisdom whilst Al-Kindi was there).
      - Cyph0n 8y ago
        It is referred to as Islamic science because: a) Scientists came from a wide variety of backgrounds, but were usually of Muslim faith. For example, the term "Middle East" would not be accurate since many scholars were Persian and West Asian. b) Scholars were typically funded by patrons who were associated with the Muslim empire/caliphate. c) To a lesser extent, many of the prominent scholars first learned Islamic science and philosophy -- typically at a young age -- before delving into the natural sciences.
        pbhjpbhj 8y ago
        It's interesting we don't [in the UK nor in English language sources online] refer to the likes of Kepler as being part of Christian science, despite the characters often being trained priests in one denomination or another [Copernicus, say, was a doctor of canon law], often being funded by Church patrons. There's an interesting divergence in the perceptions; I'm interested in whether that's a modern issue or if it represents something inherent in the mode of the science being performed? Wikipedia mentions scientists who were historically - and are elsewhere - known for their Christian faith, priests and such but without mentioning that they were Christian believers but with scientists who were living in Islamic countries [I don't know the history to know if they, for example were Imams or wrote religious treatise] they're flagged as Muslims. Copernicus/Kepler/Brahe [I didn't check further] aren't claimed to be Christian, Al-Kindi is claimed in the first sentence as a Muslim amongst Muslim scholars, in a Muslim World, etc.. Any input on historic differences, IYO, that lead to these different characterisations?
muro 8y ago
The number of slaves steadily decreased as the Rome stopped expanding. Additionally, by the time Rome turned into an empire, freeing of slaves became a show of magnanimousity and so frequent, Augustus (= around 0AD) had to put extra laws limiting it. Thus, the Roman empire had a shortage of slaves and couldn't just "count on the slaves" for everything.
pjmlp 8y ago
I think the biggest reason was the fall of the imperial. Outside what is now known Italy, many Roman outposts only had a glimpse of Roman technology and as they got conquered by their enemies, everything got destroyed and the knowledge was lost in that part of Europe. It is impressive to read books like Herodotus and realizing Greek students that could afford it where doing "internships" in Egypt, where the idea of specialized doctors was already a thing.
simonh 8y ago
Most of Rome's engineering achievements were not performed using slave labour though. They were largely executed by the army. Slaves worked in plantations and mines, but tended to die out after a generation because slaves having babies and raising children were unproductive, so the slave economy relied on a constant influx of new slaves from conquests. Once the Empire largely stabilised it's borders, the supply lines ran dry and the population of slaves dwindled away. The idea of a Dark Ages is largely a north-western European one because we got largely cut off from Rome for a few centuries. In Italy and France, and especially in the Byzantine Empire there was no Dark Age. Technological progress didn't stop and slavery was no longer a major sociological or economic factor.
- loggedinmyphone 8y ago
  There was a Byzantine Dark Age in the 7th and 8th Centuries where perfume lived under the rubble of previous cities hiding from Arabic and other invaders. The Roman aqueducts went into disrepair and people went back to drinking from wells. There was a major population collapse. They did make some cool devices though like clocks and mechanical lions, as well as Greek fire. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2016/06/the-byzantine-dark-ages http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2016/06/the-byzant...
  - simonh 8y ago
    I wasn't aware of that, thanks!
- fsloth 8y ago
  "slavery was no longer a major sociological or economic factor." Slavery was still an important economic factor in the early middle ages ("Dark ages"). "By ...(741–752), Venice had established a thriving slave trade, buying in Italy, and selling to the Moors in Northern Africa. .. Caravans of slaves traveled from Eastern Europe, through Alpine passes in Austria, to reach Venice." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_medieval_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_medieval_Europe
  - 8y ago
coldtea 8y ago
>Rome certainly was a highly advanced society in its time, but what a shame to think that because of vast abundance of slaves the Roman society never pushed further with technological innovations, effectively preventing the human race from having mobile phones by the year 1000, if not earlier. Thank god for that!
fsloth 8y ago
I don't think there are that many examples of roman technical innovations or scientific development. They were ultimately practical, but not overtly imaginative. They adapted, what they found practical, and could scale up what worked due to their organizational skill. I think the main impediment to progress in the ancient world was the tendency not to share discoveries but to keep them secret. No patents, but your schoolmates will kill you if you share the discoveries taught to you. Academies were not universities - more like a dude with a few disciples. If your disciples just don't get your invention it will just be forgotten. I'm sure greek went past Euclid in all sort of ways but we just never heard from them.
loggedinmyphone 8y ago
Rome had slaves but it wasn't the cornerstone of their economy. The idea that the life in each generation should be more advanced and efficient than in the previous simply hadn't been invented then.
- Balero 8y ago
  Slaves were the cornerstone of the Roman economy, especially between 100bce and 100ce. The impact of all of the slaves from the conquest of Gaul was what Ceaser used as a platform for his politics. You are right on your second point. There was an account of a person coming up with a labour saving device for cleaning streets. However they were not allowed to use it as it was taking needed jobs away from people in the city.
fsloth 8y ago
Industrialism had lot of preconditions that had to be in place. The late 18th century europe was much more complex and developed place than the roman empire ever was in several ways. 1. Science (had been picking up steam for a few centuries) 2. Capital (wealth from the colonies had been piling up for centuries as well) 3. Public demand for goods (you're not just selling to the prince, you are selling to everyone). 4. Several countries with legal systems and professional courts that upheld the law and facilitated binding legal agreements. 5. Political system that did not overrule the courts just because the king needed a bit more money After these preconditions were in place, I think one of the triggers in the industrialized age was the expanding market demand for goods. If the demand is low, there is very little incentive to move beyond human artisanal labour (ahem, artisanal mining, ahem).
- Retric 8y ago
  The largest factor was simply population size largely from gradual improvements in farming. Global population in year zero was estimated at 200-300 million. That jumpted to 700-800 million in 1700 and 900M to 1 billion in 1800. Sure the city of Rome hit 1 million people early, but that took an empire to sustain. At the start of the industrial revolution several cities where about that large. PS: The Roman Empire covered a lot of land, but it's population was somwere between modern day South Korea and Germany. And all that distance dramatically slowed down communication.
  - fsloth 8y ago
    6. Development of more productive and less labour intensive agricultural methods which increased population and released labour to other endevours. :) Thanks for the reminder!
tuomosipola 8y ago
Classical antiquity, along with Judaeo-Christian tradition and the Enlightenment, form the foundation for the Western civilization. You could throw in others but those three are the big ones, I think. The Greeks and the Romans have had a huge influence on what we have become.
maxerickson 8y ago
I think in the long view we are either still in or have just recently left the first era of human civilization, so it isn't surprising that there would be echoes of an early empire. The demarcation can be technical or social (How long has it been that we've had a shared global knowledge of history? That's a significant transition.).
enitihas 8y ago
Just curious, was Rome even at its peak bigger than the contemporary Chinese empire? Now if only the Chinese empire wasn't so self sufficient.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  not really. in 117 AD, the roman empire controlled about half the total area of contemporary china (5 million km^2 vs 9.6 million km^2). the estimated population at this time was 70 million, two orders of magnitude off china's 1.4 billion today. the only way you could consider rome to have been "bigger" is to consider what fraction of the world's population fell within its borders. about 21% of the world's population lived in the roman empire versus china's 18.4% share today. [1][2] edit: or did you mean china contemporary to rome haha? most relevant figures are for the han dynasty. area was 6.5 million km^2 in 100 AD, and population was 57.6 million in 2 AD, making the two empires roughly comparable in size. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_dynasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_dynasty
lkrubner 8y ago
Slavery overlaps with the Industrial Revolution by at least 100 years, and even longer in the colonies, such as India and Kenya. The resources needed for industrialism were dug up by slaves. It is tough to make the case that slavery impeded industrialism, when there are many cases where slavery seems to have helped industrialism. I think its best to look elsewhere for the roots of industrialism. Descartes and Newton helped form certain intellectual foundations, and the willingness of English peasants to fight and die for their religious beliefs lead to the end of the witch burning and heresy trials. That's important because a few years later Jethro Tull and Charles Townshend begin the Agricultural Revolution. Jethro Tull was 26 years old when he started working on his machines, in 1701. He was not necessarily smarter than all previous farmers, but he belonged to the first generation in history that had a guarantee that they could violate tradition and they would not be burned at the stake for it.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  > It is tough to make the case that slavery impeded industrialism Compare the free states of the Union vs the slave states of the Confederacy. The free states rapidly industrialized from 1800-1860, the slave states did not and pretty much did not advance economically at all.
  - Sangermaine 8y ago
    If you read about the economics of this period you'll find that, as with most of history, the reality isn't this simple. A lot of Southern capital went into financing Northern industry, for example. It's difficult to neatly divide the nation's economy in this way as if they were two separate spheres, as much they as they may have want to think of themselves that way.
    - WalterBright 8y ago
      Not one southern city industrialized. Investors tend to invest in things they know about and can keep an eye on, which tends to be local. Investment capital uniformly fleeing the slave states to the free ones suggests that investing in slave states was a bad investment. In those days, different states were like different countries today.
Zardoz84 8y ago
You could get a big surprise if you think that the romans get stagnated about technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_technology#Technologies_developed_or_invented_by_the_Romans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_technology#Technologies_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mill http://www.waterhistory.org/histories/barbegal/ http://www.waterhistory.org/histories/barbegal/ What pushed or stagnated tech development not was slavery. What push us quickly since the modern age, was the free movement of ideas and knowledge (thanks to the printing press and paper making the books affordable) and the scientific method.
nradov 8y ago
You might enjoy the alternate history novel "Kingdom of the Wicked" by Helen Dale. It takes place in the Roman Empire where the industrial revolution arrived 2000 years early partly due to abolishing slavery. https://www.ligatu.re/book/rules/ https://www.ligatu.re/book/rules/
WalterBright 8y ago
Foundational as well is the printing press. Rome didn't have one, and perhaps went as far as it could without it. While the printing press is probably required for industrialization, it is not sufficient. Your point about slavery holding it back is a good one.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  Further support for this notion comes from the fact that in the southern US slave states, it was illegal to teach the slaves to read. It would be pretty hard to industrialize when the workforce is forcibly kept ignorant.
- Balgair 8y ago
  Part of what made the printing press work was the metallurgy required. You needed quality iron and steel for the screws and the typefaces, brass and bronze would not endure the stresses. Those metallurgic advancements largely came out of war and the need for metals that could handle black-powder explosions.
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    Even Gutenberg's primitive press, which was built out of a wooden wine press, was revolutionary. It used cast lead type. The Romans had lead technology.
    - Balgair 8y ago
      Thanks for the clarification!
VLM 8y ago
Not slavery so much. As with many large scale trends there are many large scale reasons. Massive income and wealth inequality kicked in around a hundred BC or so and poverty prevents a mass production consumer economy so right there you're limited to mass production of industrial goods, meanwhile if you have millions of times the wealth of a peasant there's nothing to spend the money on so you don't care about 0.1% rate of return vs 10% rate of return if there's not enough cool stuff to spend even 0.001% rate of return on. Their financial capital markets, nascent as they were, were essentially non-functional. If you know how to make a nationwide railroad, thats nice, but theres simply no way to finance it. There were no business/financial paths to wealth and anyone who became wealthy or powerful via trade was noteworthy and extremely rare; essentially all the people with money got it by sophistry or military skill, not by being intelligent stewards of their wealth, so expecting intelligent investment is overly optimistic. (edited in, lack of existing transport infrastructure means no commodities market, so flooding the local tin market just means you sell more tin for the same total revenue...) So in England at the start of the industrial revolution you had professional-ish mine managers who saw their only way to squeeze out that next percent of revenue was crazy coal powered steam engine water pumps... If a tin mine owning Roman wanted more tin, he'd just take over another province with some legions or legally wheel and deal his way into stealing a mine from a fellow Roman. Later on Diocletian codified central economic control, communist style, see the link. If you could make a steam locomotive engine, thats nice, but it would be illegal for anyone to work for you, especially the skilled craftsmen you'd need to assemble your locomotive. Have a small economic collapse now, or patch over things to produce a much bigger one later. Guess what option we selected this century for the last couple decades, LOL, the future for us is going to be almost as exciting as the Romans declining years... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian#Social_and_professional_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian#Social_and_professi... Making a handwavy argument their civilization had reached and exceeded the scaling limit of an operational empire even for the most skilled emperors, and of course most emperors were not skilled. The point of that is increasing complexity increases fragility; a ridiculously complex economy based on silicon refined semiconductor computer technology would have collapsed much sooner, not later, and certainly not result in mobile phones in 1000 AD or whatever. If you thought Aurelian had problems with currency reform, imagine if that poor bastard had additional challenges of fractional reserve banking, high frequency trading, derivatives markets, financial alchemy such as mortgage based securities, if he had to put up with all that the poor guy would never have even tried...

jerry40 8y ago

Wow, the Oscan language had the letter "Я". I thought it exists in cyrillic alphabets only. I know they are different letters having (perhaps) different pronunciation but still. Interesting!

ithkuil 8y ago
It's very common for writing systems of that time to mirror the letters when switching write direction. In some cases text used to be written as boustrophedon, i.e. switching direction each line (like an ox plowing a field). Early Greek thus had not a fixed direction and derivative alphabets such as the Etruscan have settled to one direction of text flow and of letter shapes at random, namely right to left. Latin has "forked" from the Greek alphabet at another point in time and thus has reversed direction of writing and reverse glyphs with respect to Etruscan and Oscan
- jerry40 8y ago
  Thanks for the explanation! Mirroring the letters is very unusial concept for me. I've tried to write down a mirrored word and it was not very difficult actually. It is definitely readable.
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    Yeah, people talk about Da Vinci writing backwards as a "code" but it's an easy trick if you want to write left-handed without smearing your ink (which was even worse with older inks with longer drying times). Our brains do really well with mirroring operations, especially if you switch hands when mirroring.
    - John_KZ 8y ago
      I've noticed this too, I think it has something to do with the fact that the two hands are "mirrored" in a sense, and operations like opening/closing arms are identical except for mirroring. Who knows, maybe they're even encoded like this somewhere in the brain. After getting used to it it's not that hard to write mirrored text with the opposite hand. It's definitely a lot easier than doing it with the dominant one.

artificial 8y ago

Patrick Wyman has a great podcast on the fall of Rome (among others) and spends some time talking about the impact of regional dialects and the slow process of how those became romance foundations. Really neat stuff!

viach 8y ago

This weird feeling, when I try to read ancient greek words on these pictures, it feels like just a broken cyrillic. Like seeing a newspaper, just a very old one...

tomcooks 8y ago
Well cyrillic is indeed old greek + gliphs for slavic sounds, created by sains Cyril and Metodius
- dbuxton 8y ago
  Interestingly there's a pretty good argument that Cyril and Methodius didn't create Cyrillic at all but instead were the creators of Glagolitic, a now-more-or-less-extinct script that was developed in what's now (roughly) the Czech Republic and was used in Croatia until the 20th Century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script Exactly how Cyril got credit for the script he didn't invent is unclear.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  With 'Ш' taken from Aramaic/Hebrew.
coldtea 8y ago
>when I try to read ancient greek words on these pictures, it feels like just a broken cyrillic Well, cyrillic and the earlier glagolitic was created by some byzantine Greeks and based on the Greek alphabet, so that's not that weird...
- viach 8y ago
  Right, I know, but it's still feels unusual, like adding some level of reality to these ancient times, making them seem closer. I'm not getting this impression seeing old latin, for example.
  - coldtea 8y ago

tomcooks 8y ago

Fun fact: celtic runes were created on the lakes region by the border between Switzerland and Italy, inspired by Etruscan (coming from Phoenician), probably a Roman invention to get celtic troops to write reports https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Italic_script#Alphabet_of_Lugano https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Italic_script#Alphabet_o...

dghf 8y ago
I was going to raise an eyebrow at the use of the word "runes" in that context, but that really does show similarities to futhark.
- 80386 8y ago
  Futhark is occasionally said to have developed from a variant of Old Italic. Another hypothesis is that it's descended directly from Phoenician: http://www.academia.edu/20097046/Origins_of_runic_writing_A_comparison_of_theories http://www.academia.edu/20097046/Origins_of_runic_writing_A_...
  - tomcooks 8y ago
    Etruscan being a Phoenician derivate I don't understand the difference between the two thesis
    - 80386 8y ago
      Latin and Cyrillic are both descended from Greek, but Latin isn't descended from Cyrillic, nor vice versa. For descent from Phoenician, we should expect that the futhark developed relatively early, and was transmitted to the Proto-Germanic urheimat (almost certainly Denmark) by sea; for descent from Greek or Etruscan, we should expect that it developed relatively late, and may have been transmitted by land. Vennemann's argument in favor of descent of the futhark directly from Phoenician is that there are features preserved by the futhark that were lost by the Old Italic alphabets, and that there are features of the futhark that are best explained by an early date of development. For example, Vennemann considers the ansuz rune to have developed from Phoenician hē; but we'd expect a descendant of hē to represent /e/, not /a/. As it happens, Proto-Germanic ē shifted to ā in the descendant of all Germanic languages but Gothic. In a Greek or Etruscan descent theory, ansuz would likely have developed from some descendant of aleph, since by that time the shift would have already occurred. Unfortunately, hē and aleph are equally plausible as sources for the letterform. And the runes are named by appellative acrophony, like the letters in Phoenician, but unlike the letters in Greek (where the Phoenician names were borrowed as otherwise meaningless lexical units) or Latin (a, be, ce...). If the runes developed from Etruscan, where would appellative acrophony have come from? Then again, Glagolitic also uses appellative acrophony...

jcoffland 8y ago

> But we cannot ignore that the majority of Italia’s coinage was bilingual, suggesting that Latin was already the lingua franca among its multilingual forces. US coinage is bilingual but few Americans speak Latin.

gaytards 8y ago

the fuck is with this click bait.

tuomosipola 8y ago

For those interested I would recommend J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language. Cambridge University Press, 2003. It is more on the linguistic side with many examples in the old languages, but a really interesting book nonetheless.

80386 8y ago

You can tell "rufus" is a loan because it contains medial -f-, and native Latin words don't contain medial -f-, except after prefixes. The only Latin sources for /f/ are Proto-Indo-European bh dh *gʷh in initial position; elsewhere, they generally become /b d v/, in a process that probably paralleled the rhotacism. This sound change wasn't shared by Oscan, Umbrian, or Faliscan -- compare Faliscan "carefo" to Latin "carebo", and Oscan "mefiaí" to Latin "mediae".

tuomosipola 8y ago
Weiss's book is full of this kind of stuff. Actually, the whole point of the book is to list. Apparently there will be a new edition this year. Michael Weiss, Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin. Beech Stave Pr Inc (December 31, 2009). http://beechstave.com/weiss.htm http://beechstave.com/weiss.htm
simonebrunozzi 8y ago
Your comment is amazing. I am from Umbria, by the way (Assisi), and I felt a bit special when you mentioned this (I know it's silly, but it worked). You seem to know a lot about language and Latin in particular. I studied Latin in school, and I am still a curious reader. Would you have online resources, or books, to recommend for someone like me who'd like to stay up to date with recent research?

cicero 8y ago

The Christian Liturgy in Rome was originally celebrated in Greek and was only later translated into the Latin language, which dominated the Church until modern times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrie#In_Western_Christianity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrie#In_Western_Christianity

ilamont 8y ago

They were written by the last generation of the city who could read and write Oscan: after the Social War, Latin-speaking Roman colonists were sent to settle in Pompeii and many of the other towns of Italy to prevent future rebellions. Along with educational policies favoring the ruling language and other forms of cultural assimilation, the resettlement strategy has been effectively used in modern times, including the United States, China, and the Soviet Union.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

I find it so surprising that Greek was once the language spoken by scarcely educated people in a big part of the ancient world. I am Greek and I can manage koine (I can read it, though I wouldn't be able to, you know, speak it), mostly thanks to my exposure to the new testament when I was young, but I find Latin a much easier language to learn. I guess that's saying something about the ability of humans to learn language at any age, or about the misconceptions we have about what is an "easy" or a "hard" language to learn. Still, I can't shake this feeling that if there was one language that it made sense for so many people to learn so they could easily speak simple things to each other, that should have been Latin, not Greek- the English of the ancient world, not its German.

baldfat 8y ago
> I can manage koine (I can read it, though I wouldn't be able to, you know, speak it) We don't really know what Koine Greek sounded like but it certainly doesn't sound anything close to modern Greek. Having several years of academic Koine Greek and Classical Greek I am almost able to make out quite a bit of modern Greek. I swear modern Greek and Konie are closer then Shakespeare and modern English. Classical Greek possibly how it sounded - https://www.npr.org/2016/08/25/491389975/the-sound-of-ancient-greek-in-the-illiad https://www.npr.org/2016/08/25/491389975/the-sound-of-ancien... In Seminary we talked about the tonality of the language but we lost all that. Chinese for example is tonal.