Camels in a pack trail on the Silk Road: what did they eat? How does that logistics work?

How did the survival of wounds in war change over time? I'm assuming there was a significant jump from ww1 to ww2 with the use of antibiotics, are there any statistics on this? What about from crusade era through ww1?

A trade route isn't just a road or a trail. People don't typically start at one end and travel all the way to the other.

It's a network. So on major routes there would be resources and services that define it as said route.

Also the goods almost always changed ownership many times as they were traded along the route.

Why were the Byzantine's very weak they almost always lose territory to another empire

Is there any validity to the theory that ancient Carthage sailed to South America?

What is the earliest known instance of what we today would consider a conspiracy theory?

Did Rome Trade frequently with the Sasanian, and Parthian Empires? If so how did they manage to keep the secret of Steel weaponry i.e. Bows, Swords etc?

I know Egypt had Steel cutlery like knives etc but why did Rome never adapt to its' military? Especially after an entire legion was wiped out?

I can't give an answer but I think this would be very early in recorded history. Written Greek & Roman history, I think, will be full of them. They must surely predate Greece & Rome.

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In the days when travelers carried silver/gold in coin purses, how much would they carry and how would they replenish when they ran out if they were far from home?

Is David Hume fun to read? I struggled my way through his inquiries and treatise, and having familiarized myself with his language, I read a few of his non-philosophical essays. To my surprise, I love them! Is his History of England a good read? Is it accurate?

Were tri-corner hats good for anything but being in style? They don't seem very practical.

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No, there is no archaeological evidence that Phoenicians ever reached the Americas.

According to Wikipedia, tricot we had two main uses. First of all, they allowed people to easily see wins, which showed social status in those times. Second thing was that it was very small, so it could be tucked under your arm when you entered a building. This was customary for gentlemen.

Was the Spartan Agoge an actual building.

Two Viking related questions:

Is there any evidence/theories on why the Vikings did not explore further South after landing in Canada/Vinland? I thought Timber was priceless in the Medieval period especially to seafarers like the Vikings? Would they have not explored more seeing how the area of Vinland was pretty barren in terms of forests?

Second, is the Sunstone an actual fact, do we know how it was made or is it existence still debated, how did it work?

I'm not sure if "weak" is the right word to describe them.

The Romans were a victim of their own success. They were so rich that everyone wanted a piece of the pie, especially internally.

Corruption was normal, and their emphasis on military conquest meant that at any given time you had several very powerful private citizens with armies loyal to them (and their money) trying to carve out their own empire. They were also willing to hire people outside the Roman Empire.

The Romans conquered other people, and there shouldn't be any surprise when those other people try to conquer them back.

So the Byzantines inherited all of this, and they were constantly in some civil war or some coup or they were attacked by multiple enemies at once. Of course, they also were competing with other empires (especially the Iranian-based ones) for the same resources and territories.

The Romans used a great deal of steel weaponry and armor. Especially by the time they were regularly interacting with the Egyptians or the Parthians, etc. And there were multiple times entire legions were wiped out. So, your question really doesn't work as it is.

More broadly, steel was adopted in any culture as soon as it was reliably better (both in performance and overall cost) than bronze. And as steel manufacturing materials and techniques increased both the quality and quantity of producable steel, the use of steel increased (e.g. the gladius is a short sword because in part a longer steel sword was more likely to break. The later spatha is approx 6 inches longer in part because the quality of steel improved to the point that a longer, mass-produced sword was reliable enough to issue to the troops. If the earlier legions could have gotten enough reliable spatha-length swords, they'd have used them in a hot second).

The 'secret' of steel was a combination of different raw material supplies with different unknown impurities (which drastically affect the final steel's properties), and the fact that it takes years to train a single smith and lifetimes of trial and error to figure out improvements. They were gauging temperature by color and beating the thing until it felt right...not understanding what's going on in the metal or that carbon infiltration from the fuel is what makes the steel hard or that ore from that mine but not this one has too much phosphorous in it and needs to be refined and forged differently (as I understand it, not a smith myself). There wasn't a secret, just the general advancement of human knowledge before science was really a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravanserai

Mortality from all wounds decreased dramatically across the 20th century, from 8.5% among US troops in World War I, to 3.3% in World War II, to 2.4% in Korea, and leveling at 2.6% in Vietnam.

The mortality of patients with abdominal wounds in the US army declined from 21% in World War II to 12% in Korea and 4.5% in Vietnam

Also, for most of the history of warfare, at least until World War II, disease usually killed at a higher ratio than battle wounds: nearly 8:1 in the Napoleonic Wars, 4:1 in the Crimean War, 2:1 in the Civil War, 7:1 in the Spanish-American War, and 4:1 in World War I [29, 132]. In World War II, the ratio decreased to 0.1:1; in Korea and Vietnam, to 0.2:1; and in the 1992 Gulf War, to 0.1:1.

The source of these numbers is a great overview of advances in battlefield medicine over the centuries

The language is old and it wasn't standardized in spelling, as all the "shews" demonstrate. I think the first attempts at dictionaries trying to standardize it were only about 100 years old, but the most successful attempt by Samuel Johnson was contemporary with Hume.

I like Hume a lot, but I wouldn't say it was easy reading and you have to be pretty familiar with Descartes and Berkeley to understand what he's talking about and neither of those are that easy. Descartes has the benefit that it gets translated into English about once a generation, which makes it easier to read.

As far as his English history goes, it's supposed to be very good for the time, but at this point we have such better methods and so much more research to rely upon, and greater access to archives that have been better maintained that I think the only people who really read it anymore are academics studying Hume or the historiography of English history.

I would definitely make an effort to read Hume's Dissertation "Of the Passions" and his two Enquiries. It's better if you can read them as part of a class with an instructor who's taught them before b/c there's lots of context. Reading Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments helps too. But it's a lot to read and none of them are easy going. But it's very rewarding.

You get them in antiquity. Off the top of my head, the Romans had the Nero redivivus theories that claimed that Nero was still alive and would come back to rule Rome. This actually had some impact, as we got what we call Pseudo-Nero(s) who would show up and claim to be Nero, and some of them would get some sizable followings.

With less mythology attached, we get a lot of Pretenders who claim to be so and so's lost son, and try and seize thrones. One of the more infamous cases from antiquity was the case of Pseudo-Philip, or Andriscus, who claimed to be Philip VI of Macedon and was the direct cause of the Fourth Macedonian War.

Then you have incidents like the mutilation of the hermae and the mimicry of the Mysteries in fifth century Athens which caused a lot of conspiracy theories and a lot of witch hunts. Everything from the Spartans, or some other group, having secretly invaded, to either pro-democracy, or anti-democracy political factions sending a message, to named individuals of importance directly causing these events (something that Alcibiades was greatly affected by).

Or stories that the Carthaginians were conspiring with the Persians because two famous battles seemed to have happened on the same day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Himera_(480_BC)

When you mix in a lot of emotion, a lack of verifiable information, and a period where gossip could spread without much fact checking or wholly reliable news sources, you get a lot of things like this.

Thanks!

So there are two accounts of Leif Erikson's story: Saga of Erik the Red, and Saga of the Greenlanders.

Saga of Erik the Red says he was blown off course on his way to Greenland from Norway. He landed in Vinland, and found grapes, wheat, and maple trees. He eventually loaded the ship and went back to Greenland. He never went back, but others did.

Saga of the Greenlanders is different. Bjarni Herjólfsson was the first to see America, spotting it but not disembarking. He returned back home to tell about his discovery, and Leif decided to buy his ship so he could go back and explore. He eventually made it to Vinland, meaning Wineland because of all the grapes there. He stayed through the winter before leaving in spring or summer. Again, he didn't come back, but people such as Thorfinn Karlsefni made settlements.

They just took a bunch of resources and left, and they did have wood. They really didn’t have the need to do it. Also, part of the reason why they left is because of trouble with the natives.

I hope this answers your first question, but it’s mostly copied from a previous comment I made on a different question.

The agoge was not a building. It was a training program for most male Spartan citizens.

I'll ask here because I'm not wanting anymore for moderator approval.

If polytheistic people have a problem and they want to pray to the gods for help and they have multiple gods available who do they pray to? Let's use ancient Greeks as the believers and battle as the scenario. When Greeks were in battle did they pray to Ares? Athena? Or Nike? Maybe to their patron gods in case of isolated groups of people? Were the prayers regional or situational? Was it both or neither? I'm really intrigued in this topic because it's not really one people talk about or they just summarise it Into "people from Athens prayed to Athena and Spartans prayed to Ares". I'm really exited for the discussion in the comments. If any of you know more gods from the same religion that rule same or similar domains let me know.

Certain deities correspond to certain areas with some degree of overlap, if you wanted things to go according to plan they needed to be appeased, you might not like them (Ares wasn't thought of fondly by the Greeks) but they all needed to be paid off nevertheless. Say you were a ship's captain about to leave port, obviously you are going to give an offering to Poseidon an offering as he's god of the seas, but because you want a favourable wind, you're going to give one to Zeus too, because if you neglected either one you'd face difficulty from that area even if you were good with other one(s).

If you want, there's a series of blog posts from a lecturer at the university of North Carolina that goes into the nuts and bolts of polytheism and how dealing with multiple gods worked.

Timber wasn't that valuable, especially as the cost of moving it from North America to Europe would have blow its price out of all reasonable proportion. Timber was valuable to those living in Greenland due to the scarcity of trees there, but much of the rest of Europe instead used managed woodlands to provide the timber they needed.

Both had steel. The issue with steel is that creating it via a bloomery furnace is a finicky process on top of what was already finicky process just to produce a bloom of iron, enough that even during the (central) medieval when it was more common, the price of steel was four times that of iron, being able to outfit multiple legions with steel equipment was an expensive process such that making do with relatively inferior wrought iron for most of the gear was a more pragmatic choice that did little to hinder effectiveness.

Could Custer's command have defended Deep Ravine? ...If they had used that as a last stand location?

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Antibiotics generally are all post-WWII, except sulfa, so what was really changing outcomes from wounds was non-antibiotic antimicrobials. Not splitting hairs here; the difference is significant. Already by the turn of the 19th-20th century, it was known that silver, for example, held profound antibacterial properties. Ehrlich's "Salvarsan", a combination of arsenic with organic compound, was considered a 'magic bullet' against syphilis by the first decade of the 20th century. And it was Henry Drysdale Dakin, working at a field hospital in France during WWI, that would forever change the science of wound care. Working in conjuncdtion with Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize-winning French surgeon, he found that a dilute sodium bichlorite solution (think Chlorox plus Alka-Seltzer) had dramatic, and I mean dramatic, bacteriocidal power, and by using a dilute form, he was able to avoid the injury of healthy tissue in the area around the wound (that problem had proved insurmountable in earlier efforts in the late 19th century using solutions like full-strength chlorox, which proved toxic to tissues).

Against the protestations of fellow surgeons of the multinational allied forces of the U.S., France, Great Britain and others, Dakin argued roundly against automatic amputation of open fractures (gunshots or explosions that produced bone fracture), and to the amazement of all (likely including Dakin himself!), he proved that one could heal an open fracture without infection, by keeping it soaked in "Dakin's solution." In 2022, Dakin's solution continues to be a mainstay in the most grossly-contaminated wounds (think gangrene and bed-sores) in terms of initiating healing and controlling odors (I think one would vastly prefer treating patients in an environment that smells of a commercial laundry, rather than a meat-packing dumpster).

So yes, credit Henry Dakin with the dramatic improvement in wound care during WWI and right up to today.

Prior to WWI, and dating back to the 'Crusades Era' to which you refer, there was known to be antiseptic (no one knew about the role of bacteria and fungi in infection prior to the 1870's or so), the other solution which demonstrated efficacy over and over again, was vinegar. There is a variant second verse to the old "Jack and Jill nursery rhyme, dating back at least to the late medieval period, that goes "Up Jack got and off did trot, as fast as he could caper, to Old Dame Trot, who patched his knot with vinegar and brown paper." [The "Old Dame Trot" reference is also of signficance in dating this verse, but at the risk of chasing you down yet another rabbit hole, I will simply direct you to google Trota of Salerno and read what you like]. At any rate, by the end of the medieval period, dilute vinegar was noted to have antiseptic properties in wounds, while again not producing dangerous damage to normal tissues in the wound area.

So vinegar became a mainstay in wound therapy throughout the early modern era up into the 19th century. It too still enjoys some cachet in modern wound therapy, but has perhaps been superceded by dilute forms of Dakin's solution.

Finally, the use of honey in wounds, which is almost certainly prehistoric, also continues to this day. has a unique efficacy and cost-efficiency, which makes it useful right up to 2022 in wound healing. Now the honey used is not typically over-the-counter from the condiment section of your local grocery, but rather is a formulation known as "leptosperrmum honey" or commercially as MediHoney (still quite sweet and flavorful, but specific for wound care). It tends to stimulate the normal host inflammatory response in a wound, thus separating out necrotic tissue from normal tissue over the course of several days.

So, credit Henry Dakin for sure with the advances during the 20th century. Further advances now in the past twenty years in wound therapy have resulted in the capability of healing wounds that a generation ago would have been considered unhealable, to being resolved in less than 60 days.

There was a significant advance over the course of the American Civil War (1861-65), from little-better-than-medieval levels - as in the Seven Years' War, the Napoleonic wars, and Crimea - to almost-WWI levels by the end of the war.

This. But IIRC we do have Herodotus writing about Egyptians telling him that Phoenicians went around Africa and that the sun was in a different position in the sky due to how south they were (which happens apparently). So it’s not impossible for an ancient circumnavigation of Africa to have taken place once.

I wonder if the South America thing comes from that.

What are some good books (or other media) about Egypt during the Ptolemaic Dynasty? I'm also interested in learning about the Roman Period.

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/r/HistoryWhatIf is what you're looking for :)

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It's not known if L'Anse Aux Meadows was their only settlement in North America. From the descriptions of Vinland it seems likely that they explored the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. They might have gone further, we don't know.

Timber was very valuable to the Greenland settlements, but not valuable enough where you would export it to Europe. Vinland wasn't barren of forests. Perhaps you're thinking of Markland (Labrador)?

They took wood from Vinland to Greenland. They traded mass amounts of walrus ivory from Greenland to Europe (it was perhaps 99% of their exports), in exchange for tools and finished goods.

The Norse Greenlanders were a European civilization and it was very important to them to keep access to that European trade link. They were not fully self sufficient like Inuit people. So the Vinland settlement was perceived as just a source of materials for Greenland. I believe they likely explored further but any further settlements would have been perceived as too far from the civilizational link in Greenland.

You see the Eastern Romans greatly expand their Empire in several instances.

There's Justinian reconquering Africa and Italy.

There's Phokas reconquering Cilicia and Syria.

There's Basil the Bulgar Slayer conquering Bulgaria.

We don't know a huge amount about how this worked, but it was probably based on their region and their particular customs. These religions are "polytheistic" precisely because there was no single book or doctrine that people agreed on. They did not have the equivalent of a "Bible" to explain these things.

In Greece, each community would have one or more temples with a cult dedicated to a particular god. But they didn't necessarily have temples or cults for every single god, and the teachings of one cult probably didn't exactly match the teachings of another cult in a different city, even if they both worshipped the same god.

I suspect it was a judgment call based on factors like whose temple was nearby, who was considered the patron of a certain city, and which god's offerings had seemed to be successful in the past.

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Person A: "My father told me the story of how he sacrificed a goat to Athena, and he lost that battle. So maybe we should try Ares."

Person B: "I don't think so. The other guy's General claims he is descended from a son of Ares."

Person A: "Okay, so we stick with Athena but we try a cow instead of a goat?"

Person B: "Yeah, that sounds good."

There's a weird account in Xenophon's Anabasis.

Xenophon intends to board ships to take him men back to Greece (west), but someone starts spreading the rumor that he intends to sail to Persia (east) and give them to the Persians.

So Xenophon has to call a meeting, and he basically says, "You can all clearly see which direction I'm sailing because of the sun, and if I sail east you all can just kill me, so how could that plan even work?"

Is there a term used to refer to the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon as a whole?

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id argue that Napoleon was a part of the Revolutionary period

"Napoleonic Era" includes the tail end of the Revolution and Napoleon as a whole.

"Revolutionary France" includes the Revolution and early stages of Napoleon.

There's enough overlap and short time frames in both regards that using either to date something wouldn't be blasphemous if it crawled into one or the other category a bit more than normal. And there's nothing wrong with applying both labels if something fits into both categories perfectly. "blah blah blah during Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era France.."

From what I have read, Toussaint Louverture had no military experience prior to his role as a leader in the Haitian revolution. He was a very smart guy with a knack for administration, but he wasn’t a soldier. So how was he able to train his troops to fight, and moreover, win military victories?

How far do you agree that most British people hold a very Anglocentric view of the world wars?

Are you familiar with cases of governments which ruled through obfuscation? E.g. all those in power don't rule, only use their power to get budgets, so since the ministers don't care about running their ministries, they agree with each other and others how to run things so they'll take minimal blame and have no liability to maximize their gains.

What is the best history-related book you've ever read?

'Anglocentric' in what sense? In that they were mainly won/fought by the British, or the Anglosphere as a whole?

I am baking Christmas cookies using an old family recipe from 1870. But where did my ancestors get spices like cinnamon, cloves and ground ginger in rural Denmark? Was the trade with Asia well established at this time?

Not much to say when the player is flying the ship - do they have any effect at all - just pointing out that you're going to refer someone to the documentation (or a specific part of it), you MUST provide a link?