[HN Gopher] The Central Problem: the world of Late Antiquity fro...
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The Central Problem: the world of Late Antiquity from its Persian
centre (2021)
Author : diodorus
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-01-17 21:47 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
| arketyp wrote:
| The scholastics read Aristotle and the development of Western
| philosophy sprung from pretty much antique sources, AFAIK. It's
| logical, I guess, that the dark ages of Europe were the golden
| age of somewhere else. But it does not follow that a shift in
| center of gravity of power justifies talking about a shift of a
| center in terms of legacy and what became "modernity", the latter
| which I suppose would motivate a certain perspective on history.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Yes always amusing that civilization started in Greece
| apparently conveniently ignoring what was going on in India and
| China. You can thank centuries of colonial white superiority
| for that.
| jhgb wrote:
| For someone living in Europe, you see Greek roots everywhere
| but Chinese roots nowhere, so I'm not sure that anyone is
| "conveniently ignoring" anything, rather than simply teaching
| or learning local history.
| james-redwood wrote:
| True. I suppose what they're trying to say is that we don't
| recognise Indian and Chinese classical history as much as
| we should, which is valid considering it was
| extraordinarily sophisticated. That being said, besides
| knowledge and technological transfer, it does not form a
| core part of European history in the same way Rome and
| Greece does.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| My own country wouldn't exist if it wasn't for trade with
| Asian countries.
| Bayart wrote:
| The root civilizations of the West are originated from the
| fertile crescent (Egypt, Mesopotamia) and have nothing to do
| with neither India nor China. If anything, during the
| Neolithic and Bronze Age innovations moved from the West to
| the East.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Western philosophy maybe but Western science owes its early
| foundations to al-Biruni, al-Khwarizmi, ibn Sina, etc. That all
| began to fad in the 11th century as the Islamic equivalents of
| the gnostics eclipsed the equivalents of the scholastics. Then
| the Mongols came through and killed all the city dwellers in
| the region. But an awful lot of what later western scientists
| would build on came from that region.
|
| EDIT: And I'm not actually sure you can say central Asia didn't
| have a big philosophical impact. I seem to recall that ibn
| Sina's argument for the existence of God came to be pretty
| popular among Christians and Jews as well.
| james-redwood wrote:
| I find it strange that we see much of the golden age of the
| Middle East through the eyes of Islam. We refer not to the
| period as say for instance the Perso-Arabic (indeed, much of
| it was Persian though) golden age or something equivalent but
| rather the Islamic one, even though Islam had little to do
| for it. Some comments also mention the cities sacked as
| Islamic, and not say Persian for instance.
|
| Of course, it is a very decidedly modern and political
| framing, but inaccurate and bizarre nonetheless. As much as
| calling the Renaissance in Europe the 'Christian Golden Age'.
|
| It is also worth noting the interplay and knowledge transfer
| from China, India, Japan, and various South East Asian
| countries into Persia too: in an attempt to hold up this
| narrative, we forget to see some of the things that we give
| 'Islam' exclusive credit for that were actually merely
| translated from the Eastern original.
| Symmetry wrote:
| It behooves me to use widely accepted terms if I want to be
| understood. The early Islamic Central Asian efflorescence
| benefited a lot from being able to draw on both India and
| Europe for inspiration as well as possibly the high degree
| of numeracy caused by the Silk road.
| foobarian wrote:
| I can't help but think of Intel reading this. What happened
| to the Islamic world that they didn't capitalize on that
| progress and reach industrialization first? Was it the Mongol
| setback, or did European infighting force the tech
| advancement until it surpassed the East?
| bigthymer wrote:
| A user below mentioned that once the land-based trade
| switched to water-based, central Asia lost their main
| source of wealth since all of the overland trade was taxed.
| I agree.
|
| Another reason the Islamic world didn't reach
| industrialization first is because of a lack of capital
| concentration and resulting lack of a large merchant class.
| Christian Europe practiced primogeniture so large estates
| passed to a single, next heir. Islamic laws resulted in
| accumulated wealth being dispersed among more inheritors
| each successive generation. Furthermore, the Muslim world
| did not indigenously develop a legal corporate form that
| lasted beyond the life of any of the partners further
| limiting the ability to form large companies.
|
| If you have access, check out some of Timur Kuran's papers
| on Google Scholar.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| There isn't any consensus on this.
|
| Mongol raids destroyed a lot of Islamic cities, including
| Baghdad, a centre of learning. [0]
|
| Fundamentalist ideas and sects rose to the fore, such as
| the Hanbalis [1], who were suspicious or hostile towards
| secularism and secular science.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanbali
| trhway wrote:
| Before Mongols there were Seljuks
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seljuk_Empire. And
| fundamentalists of course played a major role. Good movie
| illustrating it
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physician_(2013_film)
| The movie also points out the conduit role Jews played
| between Muslim and Cristian worlds and thus the results
| of the persecution.
| foobarian wrote:
| Amazing movie tip, thank you very much!
| Symmetry wrote:
| That's hard to answer. The philosophical, mathematical, and
| scientific flourishing in the the silk road cities of
| central Asia in particular during the Islamic golden age
| seems to have ended in the 1000s. Some people blame the
| influential book The Incoherence of the Philosophers[1],
| maybe they're right or maybe it just captured the zeitgeist
| and was effect rather than cause.
|
| Before too long the Mongols came. Plan A for China was
| originally to kill everyone, burn the fields, and raise the
| biggest herds ever on the resulting grassland. Thankfully
| this was quickly abandoned for Plan B, conquer and tax the
| people. But Plan B needed larger armies than Plan A and
| when Khwarezmia offered an unforgivable insult while the
| bulk of the Mongol army was needed pacifying China they got
| the Plan A treatment and why it seems so weird to us that a
| contender for largest city in the world could have ever
| been in Turkmenistan.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Phi
| loso...
| eternalban wrote:
| I've thought about this as well. Various factors
| contributed to ultimately displace the trade routes from
| land to water. These factors range from Mongol invasions,
| to geography. When trade stopped the flow of ideas stopped.
|
| The current geopolitical conflict is about preventing the
| shifting of trade routes back to land from Western
| controlled waterways. It is amazing to me to consider for
| example Armenia's history and see the constant back and
| forth between a west and east aligned contenders and see
| its echo it contemporary events. Ditto for the overall high
| level connectivity between east and west, and how its
| shifts mirror civilization balance between East and West.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > The current geopolitical conflict is about preventing
| the shifting of trade routes back to land from Western
| controlled waterways.
|
| The "One Belt One Road" initiative is literally being
| marketed as an attempt to re-establish those same land-
| based trade routes. Though it's also criticized by some
| since it's perceived as coming with too many strings
| attached.
| futharkshill wrote:
| What on earth are you talking about? Some science yes, but
| certainly there were scientist from the "West", e.g.
| aristoteles
| Symmetry wrote:
| Aristotle was part of the incredible flowering of math and
| philosophy in Ancient Greece between 600 and 300 BC or so.
| There was a similar flowering in western Asia between 750
| AD and 1050 AD or so. The one doesn't contradict the other.
| When Western doctors were treating patients in 1400 AD they
| were working from ibn Sina's (Avicenna's) Canon of Medicine
| rather than Hippocrates (though ibn Sina owed a lot of
| Hippocrates). When Colubus was trying to persuade everyone
| the Earth was small he was arguing mostly about al-Biruni's
| book on the topic (though al-Biruni owed a huge debt to
| Eratosthenes). Again, this is more about science than
| philosophy which in Europe did tend to go directly from the
| Ancient world to the Renaissance as far as I can tell.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Indeed, in the 620s the Persian shah Khusro II almost captured
| Constantinople and was on the verge of destroying the Roman
| Empire. What would have happened had he succeeded remains one of
| history's great counterfactual questions.
|
| Not really. There were a lot of people that "almost" captured
| Constantinople. Persians, Arabs, Bulgars, various other Steppe
| nomads.
|
| Constantinople due to its geography was pretty close to as
| impregnable as could be given ancient technology (especially when
| they had naval superiority).
|
| It was only the Crusaders of the 4th crusade in the 1200's and
| the Ottoman Turks in 1453 that successfully conquered
| Constantinople. The former had naval superiority thanks to the
| Venetians, and the latter had gunpowder.
|
| In fact, because of the strength of its defenses, one of the main
| strategies of the the Byzantine Empire was the tie down the bulk
| of the enemy's armies before the wall of Constantinople, and then
| attack their rear, which is exactly what the Emperor Heraclius
| did to the Persians leading to their defeat.
|
| In addition, the outcome of the war didn't matter so much,
| because it exhausted both Empires and made them ripe for being
| conquered by the Arab Muslim armies (the Byzantine Empire pretty
| much lost all their Middle Eastern provinces, and the Persian
| Empire was completely conquered).
| Pigalowda wrote:
| Heraclius deserved better for the incredible effort he put in.
| Sad thing to watch it go up in smoke 10 years later. Same could
| be said for the Sassanids though.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| In contemporary IT terms, Constantinople acted as a honeypot
| for attackers.
| eternalban wrote:
| Two items from the author of the book itself that delve deeper
| into the geopolitical background of this historic period:
|
| _" Roman historians claim that the Sasanians were aiming to
| recreate the first Persian empire of Cyrus the Great. This meant
| pushing the Iranian border with Rome further and further west.
| Unsurprisingly, Rome and Iran were nearly constantly at war. The
| two powers competed for even the smallest advantage along an ill-
| defined and porous frontier running south from the Caucasus into
| Arabia. Each war was worse than the last, and conflict spread
| southward as far as Ethiopia, with Iran and Rome eventually
| contesting control of the India trade through the Red Sea. The
| 6th-century Roman emperor Justinian could not break the Persian
| monopoly there, so he and his successors tried to dominate the
| overland silk trade from China.
|
| This evolved into a world war when the Turks got involved. In the
| 6th century the Turkish nomads of Inner Asia were the foremost
| military power of the age. They had overthrown the Huns who
| menaced Iran from the east, and had built an empire stretching
| from the borders of China to the Caspian Sea. With Roman backing,
| the Turks aimed to disrupt the Persian monopoly on the India
| trade by flooding Iranian markets with cheap Chinese silk which
| they had received as tribute from rival Chinese dynasties. Iran
| retaliated, and the armies of the Persian king Hormizd IV fought
| Roman and Turkish troops on multiple fronts and emerged
| victorious - further proof that the Iranian war machine was more
| than match for its rivals."_
|
| [https://www.asor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Bonner-Febru...]
|
| --
|
| _Lessons from the Last Empire of Iran_ goes a bit deeper and
| concludes:
|
| _I wrote The Last Empire of Iran to tell the story of the
| Sasanian dynasty from beginning to end. It is a narrative that
| covers some of the most important events of human history. And
| over the past 1,400 years, the story has lost none of its power._
|
| https://quillette.com/2020/07/31/lessons-from-the-last-empir...
| pm90 wrote:
| The book itself is $100. I get that it's a scholarly work but ...
| I find it hard to justify spending that much as someone not in
| the field professionally.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Would your life be better if you spent $100 on junk food,
| alcohol, pot, gasoline or Netflix instead?
| pm90 wrote:
| Yes, actually it would be. Those are all things required to
| live a life that I find fulfilling.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| It's your life, your money, and your choice.
| a11r wrote:
| Perhaps search for a library that has it.
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/last-empire-of-iran/oclc/1138...
| pm90 wrote:
| Amazing, thanks! I did try looking up in my local city
| library (it didn't have it) but using your link I found
| there's a Uni library nearby that does have it!
| yetanotherloser wrote:
| OK, no dog in this particular fight but as a general
| principle... why? You can burn through a hundred bucks
| remarkably easily on subscription TV or live sports or computer
| games or board games or a few trips to the cinema or a day out
| or a really good bottle of something... what is it about a book
| that makes it "hard to justify"? ok, if you can't afford $100
| for anything, you can't afford $100 for anything and that's a
| different (and worse) category of problem. But if you're lucky
| enough to have money to spend on yourself, why should an
| interesting book - which you can pick up secondhand and flip if
| it's not for you - rank low?
|
| "When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any
| left, I buy food and clothes." - Erasmus
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