This whole channel is absolutely amazing. I watched almost the entire thing over the last 3 months -- 17 episodes of 2 to 4 hours on various civilizational collapses.
There were a bunch I didn't know about at all -- like medieval civilizations in Cambodia, Burma, and Jordan. They were wealthy, and built huge things, and then disappeared.
Also, I have heard of "Carthage" from all those movies like Gladiator ... Somehow it escaped me until my 40's that Carthage was founded by people from what's now Syria, and the city was in what's now Tunisia :) I guess being American I have a fuzzy picture of that side of the world, and what it looked like in ancient times.
Carthage has to have the goofiest downfall of a culture in all history. The Carthaginians labelled their ship parts for efficient construction. Rome captured one of their ships and found all the labels. Rome then made the better style ship made by Carthage and conquered them mainly due to the ships. It's like death by Ikea.
The Romans actually had a difficult time beating the Carthaginian navy. They tried to copy their ships, but without the ship-building experience, they didn't have much success. To level the playing field, they invented the corvus (AKA the "crow") [1] which was a boarding bridge designed to pierce the enemy ship and allow combatants to board. This played to Rome's strength as a land power with much better hand-to-hand combat troops.
The Corvus had much success in battle, but it is thought to have significantly weighed down ships and offset their center of mass. So at one point, the Roman Navy was stuck in a storm and is thought to have lost over 350 naval ships (and 300 cargo ships) and 100k men at once. It is thought that the corvus might have been responsible for making the ships more likely to capsize during this storm, as the Romans stopped using them after this disaster [2].
Sadly for Carthage, in that era Rome's main strenght was its ability to take aburd losses and then just recruit back a giant army right after. There is quite a number of times where they lost a % of their army / populace similar to what that has crumbled many empires through history, but Rome just got back up like it's nothing.
I can't imagine how their ennemies must have felt in those instances.
Roman success as a lengthy enduring civilization, from what I understand, has much to do with implementing and optimizing repeatable processes.
E.g. Recruiting and equipping a huge army once, but losing it in a battle. Versus building an economic machine around the ability to continually recruit, train, and equip huge armies.
I wonder how different the recruiting process for the Romans was from today's modern recruitment efforts. 1) start with prisons, 2) offer service to those facing prison, 3) look for the unemployed, 4) tell potential recruits that they will experience the exact opposite of what will actually occur
Today's modern recruitment process in volunteer armies is more like:
1) Start with children who don't know any better.
2) See #1.
The reason that Russia is enlisting prisoners, is because the MOD needs more people than their peace-time mandatory service contracts are able to provide, but knows that a full draft would be highly unpopular.
Roman recruitment was nothing of the sort. It was not voluntary, it was expected that everyone would participate, and there would be serious consequences for draft-dodgers, both on the level of their local communities, and on a wider social scope.
That's selling modern and historical recruitment short: there's always been personal economic calculus for volunteer armies.
"Will service improve my personal situation? Enough to be worth it?"
Hence why recruitment correlates with unemployment.
Nations with effective recruitment policies understood this, and typically funded it with things they had in abundance (e.g. land grants, pensions, etc).
Actually in many ways the Russian army today is vastly superior to the one they had 2 years ago. They use drones, they have better comms (as in actual encrypted radios and not cell phones stolen from civilians), they don't concentrate people and munition in one place, they don't attack with columns of tanks and troop transporters (vulnerable to Bayraktars and Javelins) and so on.
I'm conflicted by your comment. Against Ukraine's army ? Absolutely, you're right. Against a modern 2023 western army ? Their loss in equipment downgraded them severely.
It could easily be both at the same time. Through trial by hard, practical experience Russia may have greatly improved its military tactics, while also experiencing a loss of hardware quality on losses for hard to replace equipment. I've heard this is the case and that many of their tanks and other equipment are decidedly of the older kind.
Also, even experience wouldn't necessarily be helpful against the U.S. army in direct combat if it came to that. People sometimes call the U.S. military pampered and oversupplied, but they might forget that, being so often deployed in major operations, it's, aside from being the world's best funded military, also probably one of the world's the most experienced militaries with troops and tactics tested in hard, practical, multifaceted combat.
I don't disagree. When asked why we insist on sending troop on every freaking conflict out there especially in africa, our (past) defense minister answered that experienced troops still trumps everything else, it's not enough to train and equip them. France might not be a world superpower or not even close to it anymore, but our troops have fought, and everyone who knows what they talk about says it makes them better than most.
But if they do win (for the record, I hope they don't), it won't be because they had superior technology. Or superior generals. It won't be because their cause was righteous.
They will have won because they kept piling on with more infantry beyond what anyone would have thought possible.
Oh I agree, but I'm also of the very macabre and morally evil view that, for the west/nato, the current situation is the best one we could hope for (short of the dream of "ukraine beats russia").
We don't lose lives, we spend money but not enough that we actually feel it, Russia need to concentrate so much on it their ability to act elsewhere is disminished (sure they launch all their triggers/ Houthi, Venezuela, Sub-saharian africa, but it's not 2016 anymore), ...
It's frankly horrible, but every time an ukrainian solider dies to kill two russian soldiers, western countries safety position improves. I'm not saying I agree with that, or think it's good, to be clear. But I think that the west never considered Ukraine in their sphere and the horrors that have happened since 2013 have invariably been in favor of "us" and not russia, and russia is so focused on playing the game the way it was played last century it feels like they missed it.
It says Russia's economy is smaller than that of California, Texas, and New York. That sounds about right.
(and of course war is mainly an economic contest)
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They are not a threat to the West. The West is a threat to Russia.
Russia is aggressive and violent because they're in a weak position. They were invaded by Napolean, by Germany in WW I, and by Hitler's Germany in WW II (notably, these are all western powers).
Russia lost ~27,000,000 people in World War II, while the US lost ~400,000.
In the meantime, the US has NEVER had a war on its soil.
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The US would not accept missiles in Cuba in the 1960's. Would we accept Chinese missiles in Mexico in 2024?
It's not a surprise that they would not accept NATO weapons in Ukraine.
Obviously I'm not condoning the invasion, but I'd also say that old men in the US are playing with the lives of young Ukrainian men.
If the US wanted to end this war, we could do it today by actually winning it with our weapons. Instead we trickle out the bare minimum of weapons, ensuring the war grinds to a stalemate.
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If I were Zelensky, I wouldn't make myself and my citizens dependent on powers who actually don't want to win the war.
I wouldn't want to be dependent on people like you, who just want to use the lives of my citizens for to gain an inch in an imaginary game that has little consequence for them.
> They are not a threat to the West. The West is a threat to Russia.
Nothing stops Russia from ceasing warfare and signing a permanent peace (and trade!) agreement with the West. Obviously nobody is invading Russia nor does anyone in Europe have the slightest interest in it. In January 2022 they were still imagining Putin as a partner. They can barely bother to invest in their militaries or Ukraine's even now.
There would never be warfare again at that latitude from the Atlantic to the Pacific - and back again, all the way around the planet. Russians would be far better off, living in peace for generations to come. But Putin wants an empire.
Before you sympathize too much with Carthage, bear in mind that their (well documented by contemporary sources even if you account for anti-Carthagian propaganda from some Roman sources) religious practices were distinctly grotesque, involving no shortage of child sacrifice that even included burning children alive. Notable families were also encouraged to do the same to their first sons in times of crisis, but would often buy the children of poor people to go in their place.
I know the Romans really, really disliked the Carthagians, so it must have tainted their view on them in all circumstances, but even then, there are enough sources professing outright disgust about their sacrificial practices to give the complaints some weight. And if Romans of all people are disgusted with how brutal a country's cultural practices are, you can imagine that they probably were pretty damn awful.
While it's interesting and something I hadn't heard about, Carthage's potential religious human sacrifice aspect of culture, this comment is ironically not that far off from historical views/curiosities of rival societies.
I'm reminded of how most all the hallmarks we attribute to the Spartans turns out to be literal hearsay of the time (much of it emanating from...yep, times of conflict/rivalry). Although they were apparently intentionally secretive, it's pretty easy to imagine some not-anthropologist merchants passing along gossip which gets taken in by the rival permanent settlements.
Not that Carthage is free from accusation, but I'm reading some historians actually claim Romans found the religious ceremony of sacrifice to be abhorrent, as opposed to the more general infanticide that was recorded throughout the larger region (including Rome) for presumably a more eugenic/pragmatic purpose.
The Spanish also had many accounts of Mayan child sacrifice. These accounts were often dismissed by historians on suspicion of prejudice. We've more recently found archaeological evidence of the Mayan practice on a massive scale.
Sometimes dismissing evidence because of perceived bias is simply incorrect.
To be fair, I haven't ever heard suspicions of prejudice as an argument to discredit Spanish expedition's writings on the matter, presumably as I've heard the accounts were often eyewitnessed, unlike typical Roman/Greek depictions of distant places they were frequently declaring cultural and actual war on.
I also didn't dismiss potential evidence for Carthage's sacrificial culture, of which there's enough to make the accusation, but really, only that.
I don't actually have a horse in the races of dead people, but I do hesitate to perpetuate even ancient culture wars. It's usually just going to make more use of people's tribal desire than their deductive skills, though why people have emotions about ancient, dead societies, I'll never know.
Rome bad-mouthed the Rasenna (Etruscan in Latin) basically calling them all whores. But some Rasenna people were a big part of Roman history and even Senators. Rome wrote history to suit themselves. It's the same with Carthage almost nothing exists except for what Rome said the culture was like.
It just happens that current world we live in is influenced by European civilizations, which were significantly influenced by the Romans. So your world view is stemming from Roman culture.
Now imagine Carthage won the Punic wars and destroyed Rome, what would we be disgusted with while reading about Roman customs? What would we be considering brutal, awful and barbaric?
I would consider sacrificing living children to be brutal and grotesque no matter who does it or for what reason, Roman, Carthagian or Aztec, or anyone else. As for your premise, it's flawed. For a society whose world view supposedly stems from Roman culture, we're kept extremely aware by many sources about how brutal the Romans could be too. It's hardly something painted pretty by modern media or books. Quite the opposite.
It's also generally absurd to think that I must automatically be influenced by some propaganda if I consider plausible the ancient records and evidence of another society's extreme sacrificial practices.
As another comment in this reply thread mentions, (though it mistakes Aztecs with Maya), people spent decades thinking that accounts of mass Aztec child sacrifice were colonial era-biased exaggerations, until mass graves of children were much more recently found showing signs not only of sacrifice but torture in advance (to induce tears for the god Tlaloc among other reasons).
Sometimes historical cultures are just awful in certain ways that have to be mentioned in posterity, even if we can appreciate other aspects of those cultures. This applies to any culture and should.
Yes! The Ikea reverse engineering, the Corvus, and the sudden huge Roman casualties were all mentioned in the Fall of Civ episode! Pretty crazy and fascinating
Anecdotes like that, while interesting[1], are rarely the principal cause of an entire nation-state's downfall.
The principal cause for why Rome was so successful at beating up its neighbours was well-executed logistics and a capable bureaucracy.
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[1] Interesting, but non-nonsensical. How would labeling the parts of an already-completed ship meaningfully impact reverse-engineering efforts? It's a ancient ship, not an composite airplane, or a microchip, you can rip it apart, piece-by-piece, without the benefit of labeling.
When I was young, one of my mentors said "half of engineering is knowing the vocabulary".
The older I get, the more I'm convinced he's right. The names of parts helps give some amount of context and purpose to why a thing was done, what it's role is, etc.
This gives a much quicker comprehension to the thing you're trying to understand - consider someone handing you a codebase you've never seen, and a vague description of what it does. Is it easier to understand with well named functions, variables and types? What if the all function names were replaced with f1, f2, ... fn, and variable names were replaced with v1, v2, ... vn, and so on?
What if it wasn't a complete codebase, but only part of it, and had gone through a bit of a scramble (the Carthaginian ship in question had been wrecked as I understand it)? What if you were a brand new programmer (Rome was new to the whole ship thing then...)?
You're absolutely right that it's not strictly necessary to have the labels for reverse engineering, but the labels certainly help... for context it was 8 years from the start of the war until the battle in question, and the fleet was built in just 4 years. At that rate, I find the label thing a plausible contributing factor.
Carthage and Rome also fought what was by some measures (by number of ships or sailors) the biggest naval battle of all times, even taking WW2 into account.
Fun fact is that they have this record "only" because the east asians seas just kept screwing with everyone doing massive fleets. The mongols, koreans, japans ...
There is a podcast too which I listen to on the go.
I’m also American and living in Europe for the past decade, and having dived into history such as Roman, Carthage, the Celts, … has really made me appreciate the vast history of our species. I can drive down the ride and see a huge castle the was attacked by Hannibal on his quest for Rome.
And my native friends where I live couldn’t care less :(
I hope America can preserve its history for a while so others can enjoy it in 1000 years like we do with Rome.
Americans have preserved their history somewhat. https://youtu.be/aB6AUYr6Ecs great channel, fascinating especially their collapsing hierarchies. They formed temporary hierarchies to build luxurious settlements for everyone to live in, then collapsed back into being non hierarchical.
You are perhaps only looking at big history, as does the trope prescribe ;) Chances are that your native friends have a lot of small history to tell, and you might find it interesting.
> And my native friends where I live couldn’t care less :(
Well, I wouldn't care for the history of a long dead civilisation either if my own civilisation and culture has been destroyed in the last half millennium by invaders. There are less than 4 million people in 2023.
And America will preserve its history but I don't think it will be seen in a positive light to be enjoyed.
> Also, I have heard of "Carthage" from all those movies like Gladiator ... Somehow it escaped me until my 40's that Carthage was founded by people from what's now Syria, and the city was in what's now Tunisia
At least accordingly to myth Carthage was colonized from Tyre, which is today in Lebanon.
> Carthage was colonized from Tyre, which is today in Lebanon.
It was founded by Phoenicians [0], whose land today largely coincides with modern-day Lebanon, which as a self-governing state is a relatively modern construct (post WW1).
I feel like most believable group for the sea peoples were migrants who had to leave their lands because the food supply had collapsed. Wasn't it the salinity had increased in deserts or something similar to that?
Just a reminder that the distinction between Lebanon and Syria is quite recent - due to the breakup of the Ottoman empire. There more well-known named region historically is A-Shaam in Arabic, Syria often in English:
Phoenicians, the people who founded Carthage, also used an early alphabet (depending on who you ask it may have been the first alphabet). English alphabet is based on Latin, which is based on Etruscan, which is based on Greek, which is based on the Phoenician alphabet.
Growing up in Europe Phoenicia and Carthage were covered extensively in school. Interesting why in US schools they don't teach world geography and history.
In primary school, after doing extra reading on the Phoenicians and Etruscans, I handed in a couple of history assignments written using the respective alphabets to be a smart-ass (with the "logic" that she'd never specified which alphabet to use). To her credit, instead of punishing me for it, my teacher wrote the corrections using the same alphabets.
But I only recently learned about the final fall of Carthage in the second Punic war, when Hannibal had to return to Africa to face the young Roman general Scipio. The war elephants weren’t so veteran and so the Roman’s were able to scare them off as they charged, breaking the Carthaginian line, leading to a rapid routing.
Great battles were described in fairly great detail —
Most war elephants were extensively trained with burning pigs. But they forgot to allocate enough budget for flaming porcine that year, and the mistake was fatal.
This is why the Congress never fails to add pork to every spending bill, just in case the Romans return.
I've heard the hypothesis that many in the US elite saw the confrontation with USSR as being similar to the Punic wars. With US similar to Carthage being the sea/trading power and USSR similar to Rome being the land power - poorer, but highly militarized. This being one of the arguments for keeping the US military budget high, as one of the reason for Carthage destruction was it's elites had a lot of money, but didn't invest enough into army and navy.
In the US, the school system is significantly less standardized than in most other parts of the world, and the quality of education is incredibly dependent on zip code. So my public school in an admittedly fairly wealthy area certainly covered the Phoenecians and Carthage (though Carthage mostly in the context of Rome and the Punic Wars).
There is no such thing as an English alphabet. English uses the modern Latin alphabet, as do most European languages, full stop. Some languages make use of diacritics or have one or two (extra) modified letters (e.g. Ł or IJ), but English doesn't use any of that (unless a word is imported).
> There were a bunch I didn't know about at all -- like medieval civilizations in Cambodia, Burma, and Jordan. They were wealthy, and built huge things, and then disappeared.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
"Shelley wrote the poem in friendly competition with his friend and fellow poet Horace Smith (1779–1849), who also wrote a sonnet on the same topic with the same title." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
Naught but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder — and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place
I didn’t realize this is on YouTube. I see it provides a little bit of visual context, but I listen to this as a podcast and I agree, it’s absolutely fantastic quality material. The Greenland Vikings was my favorite of the four I’ve heard so far (Greenland, Carthage, Nabateans and Byzantium) but they are all very good.
Yeah in general the existence of so many sophisticated peoples without surviving words or even names/identities -- peoples with the ability to wage warfare against established civilizations like Egypt -- is a bit haunting to me
It reminds me of Graeber's Dawn of Humanity (good book, though I would also say there are parts you can skim, and still get the message. Also I don't take everything at face value, but it's worth thinking about)
He reminds us that there were politically conscious groups of Homo Sapiens living for tens of thousands of years throughout history! They organized their societies in much different ways than ours.
But many of them didn't leave a trace, either because they didn't write stuff down, or because their documents were destroyed by other people who were able to get on ships with weapons and diseases.
(I actually didn't know that the Romans completely destroyed Carthage's documents and libraries before watching the podcast. They wiped them off the face of the Earth, so the only things we know about Carthage are what the Romans said. Also, "Carthage" isn't even what they called their city -- it's what the Romans called it.)
History is really written by the winners of wars, but there are other ways to live
the sadder and more impactful legacy of a dye is Indigo - which is not lost or forgotten. It was in such great demand that Europe funded explorers like Vasco Da Gama specifically to discover the source of Indigo.
Named after India, it was one of the incentives for colonisation and indeed the Great Bengal Famine (which affected 30 million people).
It became one of the most remarkable peasant movements of Indian history against the British. It came to be called the Neel Bidroha or the Indigo Revolt.
The Indigo famine drama script that was created by the Anglican priest James Long and Indian writer Dinabandhu Mitra - Nil Darpan (Indigo Mirror) - was the root cause of the creation of the National Theatre in Kolkata. The British banned the play in England saying it "slandered British women for desiring the Indigo dye".
The National Theatre (and the Indigo play) in Kolkata kickstarted the Indian commercial performing arts industry...eventually culminating in Bollywood.
We did something similar with cinnamon and Ceylon/Sri Lanka. Also moved to the Caribbean.
Though now there are two plants we call cinnamon, and I think the new world mostly produces the other one, which is why Ceylon Cinnamon is a ‘thing’ now.
Pepper was similarly more valuable than gold, but I don’t recall the sordid history on that one.
> In 1998, by means of a lengthy trial and error process, a process for dyeing with Tyrian purple was rediscovered.[37][38] This finding built on reports from the 15th century to the 18th century and explored the biotechnology process behind woad fermentation. It is hypothesized that an alkaline fermenting vat was necessary. An incomplete ancient recipe for Tyrian purple recorded by Pliny the Elder was also consulted. By altering the percentage of sea salt in the dye vat and adding potash, he was able to successfully dye wool a deep purple colour.[39]
So in that regard, the article seems not entirely correct.
Why do you believe the article Wikipedia cites, filtered through some person who edited Wikipedia, rather than the OP? If the Wikipedia editor read the OP, the OP would be quoted/cited instead - and maybe that will happen.
Just noting: a similar pigment with high value was Tekhelet, which was also extracted from a similar sea snails species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet
Very interesting. If I understand correctly, it is exactly the same pigment, coming from the same sea snail (Hexaplex trunculus), only that the application to textiles was different: if you dye a cloth and keep it in the dark until it dries out it becomes reddish-purple, if you let it dry in the sun it becomes blue.
Why is he smashing them up? Such a cruel waste. Those snails are rare. You can just poke them with a stick and they spit dye. Then you put them back. I guess he doesn't know that there is still Murex purple being harvested in North America.
I saw this same video a couple of months ago. Don’t remember how I ended up getting that recommended to me. Probably watching videos about cinnamon and pepper (trying to figure out how white pepper is different from black).
Purple dyes can be made easily from many natural sources.
Nevertheless, none of those has the lightfastness and the permanence of the pigment extracted from snails, which were the reasons for its very high value in the antiquity.
After Tyrian purple, the blue dyes from indigo or woad are the next best in lightfastness, and then some of the red dyes. Most natural dyes fade rather quickly, so in antiquity it was usual to dye again the expensive garments from time to time, not only to wash them.
Now it is possible to synthesize the pigments that compose the Tyrian purple, but the process is much more expensive than for the cheap purple synthetic dyes that are commonly used.
Fall of Civilizations 17 - Carthage: Empire of the Phoenecians
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dbdVhVSat8
This whole channel is absolutely amazing. I watched almost the entire thing over the last 3 months -- 17 episodes of 2 to 4 hours on various civilizational collapses.
There were a bunch I didn't know about at all -- like medieval civilizations in Cambodia, Burma, and Jordan. They were wealthy, and built huge things, and then disappeared.
Also, I have heard of "Carthage" from all those movies like Gladiator ... Somehow it escaped me until my 40's that Carthage was founded by people from what's now Syria, and the city was in what's now Tunisia :) I guess being American I have a fuzzy picture of that side of the world, and what it looked like in ancient times.