Those maps are good - yet they don't explain the Roman Empire.
It's actually tricky to explain the Empire. Over 7 centuries without _any_ significant technological progress. A political regime that is as archaic as its borders are vast - and it drove Europe's political agenda up until the 19th century.
It's possibly the most successful and devastating face of the plutocracy. When the Empire faded away in the 4-7th century, contemporary archaelogy now thinks that people's life actually improved. The tax and ideological burden of the roman overhead was a toll on entire societies.
Exactly - apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Surprised by the hate - didn't suppose people were so attached to the Roman Empire. So:
- Sanitation: "invented" in India, perfected in the middle east and imported to Rome from there
- Medicine: aryuvedic, greek, chinese and babylonian medicine all eclipse Rome's. The Empire definitely did not invent anything there. Lookup Hippocrates for a big founder.
- Education: also a Greek and Egyptian tradition.
- Wine: strange claim. "Invented" as far back as Neolithic. Massively used in Greece. Rome improved the way wine barrels can be reused.
- Public order: not sure what you mean. There was order and dense cities before the Empire. Codified political systems and local law enforcement as well. If the "city" order is your point, then Rome and Babylon are "inventors".
- Irrigation: like most others, Rome imported fertile crescent know-how. Zero roman invention.
- Roads: the technology for smooth, paved roads existed before Rome in most middle-east. What Rome brought is empire-wide cheap labor and strategic need for straight lines (legions move faster). You could compare it to high speed rail today. Did France "invent" it, or did it get most clues from Japan? Most roman roads, being actually built for the military and not for trade, were abandoned quickly because they were too steep for long-distance cargo.
- Fresh water system: water supply in urban area has not been invented in Rome, imported as well. Like roads, cheap labor and cheap capital turned existing tech into massive, continental infrastructure
- public health: like therms and public baths? Common in the whole mediterranean world (still today).
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In comparison, the Mediterranean world before Rome discovered within a few centuries:
- the pulley
- the screw
- the water mill (greek invention just before roman conquest. The windmill was invented later on in Europe during the "middle ages")
- cement (also greek-born)
- millstone (india)
Were the Romans great engineers? Yes. For instance they brought together cement and arch technology to build some of the larger structures of that time.
Yet the Roman empire a time of great inventions? No. Few innovators in tech and abstraction. Ptolemy was egyptian. Archimedes was actually killed by the Romans when captured.
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@vacri and others below: where did I say "roman republic"? I only mentioned the Roman Empire. A deeply flawed regime built on clientelism and which survived through a flow of capital from new territorial extension towards the insiders. It was indeed crazy archaic - the integration of religions, private interests and decision making is hard to imagine to modern minds. For centuries, the Emperor actually fed a large part of the capital, paid by capital inflow from new conquests, with many critical decisions taken upon Omen interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augury
I know how much love there is in the US for roman law -- but roman empire? You definitely want to be out of it.
What hate? You seem to take this pretty personally. For what it's worth, the post you're replying to was a reference to Monty Python's Life of Brian. Your post contained interesting information though, so I'm sort of glad you missed the joke.
What did Rome ever do for us? They made the peace and the single state that made the spread of all of this technology happen so quickly. Britain had nearly none of that stuff before the Romans.
This is pretty wrong. The view you describe arises from the complete renewal in the history of the Middle Ages that occurred from the 1950s onwards, and which established that the commonly called "Dark Ages" weren't so dark after all.
But that's not to say that there wasn't a precipitous drop in life quality after the end of the Roman Empire. Recent archeological finds have improved our understanding of the details of Roman daily life way beyond what we used to know even thirty years ago.
For a good and accessible overview of the latest finds in Roman archeology, I'd recommend "The Fall of the Roman Empire and the End of Civilization" by archeologist and historian Bryan Ward Perkins.
He highlights how much the Roman world had in common with our own period, most notably in terms of mass production of standardized goods (e.g. pottery), integration and specialization of local economies in a globalized market throughout the Empire.
The breakdown of this Empire-wide integration led to a dramatic decline in standards of living. To take just two examples extracted from the book:
- pottery finds in Britain reveal that before the Roman conquest, the vessels commonly used were all locally produced and of average quality. The integration in the Empire brought the mass-produced, standardized, high quality Roman pottery into the British economy, so much so that all levels of society had access to it (as illustrated by the archeological finds). This competition drove the British pottery industry out of the market, to the extent that by the time the Romans had to abandon Britain, there was no significant pottery production on the British isles anymore. The outcome is that the potteries found in the tombs of the first Anglo-Saxon kings are of a much poorer quality than those of the British peasants five centuries earlier - to say nothing of the Roman-made pottery a hundred years before.
- In the Roman Empire, thanks to mass production of roof tiles, almost every house had roofs made of clay tiles. This provides a host of benefits, notably in terms of durability and improved health thanks to increased insulation from humidity. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, European housebuilding went back to starch roofs - which in addition to be a poor way to protect yourself from rain or humidity can be a breeding ground for diseases and pests. It wasn't until the late 15th century that the prevalence of tiled roofs reached an extent comparable to that of the Roman world more than a millennia earlier.
I really recommend this book, it shows how the past 15 years of archeological finds have illuminated how close the Roman society was to a sort of proto-consumer society; and how much was lost when it disappeared.
This is interesting stuff, thanks. It's also fun to think about the remarkable advances in things like geared devices, automatons and water wheels in the Hellenistic period through to the end of the Western Empire. Most famously the Antikythera device: http://hist.science.online.fr/antikythera/MORE-DOCS/Greek%20...
It's tantalizing to imagine the next steps from these sorts of devices, like windmills, clocks, programmable mechanical looms, steam power, etc. Given the quality of the engineering in the Antikythera mechanism, it might have been within the technological abilities of Greco-Roman society to develop a classical era version of industrialization. Of course, then you get into the whole debate about whether a slave society has an economic impetus to industrialize (I think they do, following Sidney Mintz's point in "Sweetness and Power" that Caribbean sugar plantations in the 18th century were proto-industrial, factory-like spaces, but that's another discussion).
1/ you say that anglo-saxon kings had lower quality pottery. I said many in the former western part of the empire were better off because they were under a more local, less taxing government, and more affordable
2/ are you saying that 100% people during the roman empire had brick houses and clay roofs? They had not - it seems it was a middle class city trait. After the empire, cities declined and more independent villages developed nearer to actual production areas.
It also looks like you are mostly talking of the british isles post-Rome, which are not representative of how the continent went through the fading away of direct Rome government.
If you were to ask a villager in current France under the (elected) Clovis rule - 5 years before Rome is sacked - if his great grandfather was better off 50 years earlier under a roman militaristic region governor? Probably would be happier.
Another question would be: was the "end" of the roman empire a more prosperous time than its beginning? No it wasn't - trade was higher between 1-200AD than in the 4-5th century. And that's my whole point: the (western) Roman Empire wasn't sustainable, depended on cheap slave labor and conquests, and was not designed to solve new problems.
The Romans did have some interesting technology, but one of the things to notice about it is that the highlights are all "imperial" biased: Sturdy roads, aqueducts, buildings, and military equipment are basically the things you want to have in order to consolidate and maintain power over a large area for a long period of time. One historiographical stance to take is that, rather than being a deterministic progression like a game of Civilization, a group of people can become trapped within a locally-optimal set of technologies and their attention diverted ("bread and circuses") from other possible breakthroughs while the political leaders squabble for control.
In contrast, technologies like the printing press have subversive uses and tie in directly to the political changes of the Renaissance.
The invention of the printing press is interesting.
There was a flourishing book trade in the Roman Empire, but like most everything else books were produced through slave labour, there was enough of it to go around - imagine a big room full of scribe slaves and a reader slave at the front dictating from the master copy. Even in a podunk backwater town like Oxyrhynchus you could buy mass-produced books of quality. What was different in the time of Gutenberg is that there was a demand for books again, but scriptoria couldn't keep up with it. Mass production of books just had to happen, and this time around it had to be done without a plentiful supply of literate slaves.
There is something to be said for idea that circumstances determine what inventions will be made - it seems that right now the best minds in Western civilization are hard at work at Wall Street and Facebook, as if the most pressing problems were how to work the stock market and how to make better targeted advertising.
That is an interesting thought, but actually I would say that there have never been so many people been inventing new important things at the same time.
Smartphones, new ways of communication (such as Facebook), finding information (Google, Wikipedia), artificial intelligence (such as deep learning), ... just to name a few examples from the technology field, one of many.
"Sturdy roads, aqueducts, buildings, and military equipment are basically the things you want to have in order to consolidate and maintain power over a large area for a long period of time." The first three are also the things you want to have, well, civilization. You know, clean water, the ability to conduct trade outside of your immediate area, etc. It's about economics, not control.
Strangely, policing roads is a major factor in civilization. If you can't get your goods to market in the next town because of road bandits, then the towns are effectively cut off from one another.
There's even an argument (somebody's thesis) that patrolling roads was the single greatest event (invention?) that led to the end of the so-called dark ages and the beginning of the Renaissance.
Let me see if I can remember the chain:
Safe roads led to trade, the return of currency as a valuable resource, the need of Lords for gold instead of cattle, oxen and straw which led to the rewriting of traditional peon contracts. Following that, inflation drove the Lords out of the counties to the cities, lifting the yoke of the local despots and freeing the country.
On counter though, like in a game of Civilization, a population prospers technologically when more basic needs are satisfied. It's thanks to the stability the Romans enjoyed that they were able to elevate it's society culturally and technologically.
R.A. Lafferty's The Fall of Rome discusses the role of Goths, http://sentent.blogspot.com/2010/05/r-lafferty-and-semitic-g..., "One of the odder notions that he put into the book was the idea that the Balti, the leading clan of the Visigoths, were not originally from Germania but were aliens to northern Europe."
Life may have improved compared to the tail end of the empire, when economic problems (and misguided attempts to fix them) and raiding barbarians made life difficult. An exodus from the cities was happening, inflation was out of control, and rigid rules attempting to reverse the economic changes failed horribly (but hey, macroeconomics is hard, and wasn't really figured out until the 20th century).
But what about compared to Rome and the empire in its heyday? What about before empire compared to during empire?
> When the Empire faded away in the 4-7th century, contemporary archaelogy now thinks that people's life actually improved.
That shouldn't surprising, should it? I haven't studied history much at all, but I would have assumed that there would be a significant bump in quality of life.
In the recent past, the period between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance was called and considered the Dark Ages. The common assumption was that it wasn't a great time.
I don't think the negative concept of "the Dark Ages" has has been considered valid for many decades, even in basic history classes. The term is still used, of course, but anyone with a basic history education should know that it only implies a relative lack of historical record (which is also decreasingly the case), rather than a period of intellectual darkness or decrease in quality of life.
Over 7 centuries without _any_ significant technological progress.
This is nonsensical myth. The Romans had plenty of technological progress, particularly in construction and military technologies. As for an 'archaic' regime, they had a political system that kept together one of the world's only 1000-year nations, and whose influence is seen in any modern democracy that bears a 'senate'.
I've never really understood people's needs to say that the Roman empire wasn't all that great, particularly with the slogan "no technology" or "copied everything from the Greeks". The Romans certainly had superior socio-political technology, given that the Greeks never showed a lot of aptitude for maintaining an empire.
It's actually tricky to explain the Empire. Over 7 centuries without _any_ significant technological progress. A political regime that is as archaic as its borders are vast - and it drove Europe's political agenda up until the 19th century.
It's possibly the most successful and devastating face of the plutocracy. When the Empire faded away in the 4-7th century, contemporary archaelogy now thinks that people's life actually improved. The tax and ideological burden of the roman overhead was a toll on entire societies.