From baptism to belief
History is a mix of contingency and inevitability. It is not coincidental that human societies tended to aggregate in political size and grow in institutional scale and elaborate a more complex ideology. The early Ottoman Empire was quantitatively different than the Hittite Empire in all these things, and eventually, quantity has a quality of its […]
To beat the dragon be the dragon
In The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire Kyle Harper argues that the Plague of Cyprian, between 249 to 262 A.D., served as a massive exogenous shock to the Roman Empire that changed history. Harper observes that the structures of Roman society were reordered in the face of near collapse […]
Syrian Orontes has long since dried up, to be replaced by the Tiber once more
The paper is out, Ancient Rome: A genetic crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean: Ancient Rome was the capital of an empire of ~70 million inhabitants, but little is known about the genetics of ancient Romans. Here we present 127 genomes from 29 archaeological sites in and around Rome, spanning the past 12,000 years. We […]
Making Sense of Roman History: A Reading List
Inspired by Tanner Greer, I’ve decided to put together a list of books that I think will useful to understanding the Romans from the perspective of a non-specialist without a background in Latin, or Classics more broadly (I am in this category obviously). First, I’m a big fan of Michael Grant’s History of Rome. Grant […]
Random and inevitable forces in world history: the 6th century
In Science Anne Gibbons reports on new ice-core evidence for why the middle of the 6th century A.D. was so difficult in much of Europe: Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious […]
The souls of peoples gone
Stonehenge was first erected around 3100 BC, though the timber was only replaced with stone in 2600 BC. The great monument was a product of the Late Neolithic in Britain. Ancient DNA today tells us that these people were distantly related to the modern Sardinians, and derive from a wave of farmers that radiated out […]
The material consequences of Rome’s decline
The plot at the top is from a Peter Turchin post, History Is Now a Quantitative Science. Peter has been on this for more than ten years now. I’ve long been broadly sympathetic, but of late it’s been nice to see his formal and data-intensive approach take hold and make some waves. Using raw data […]
The Roman, the Hun and the sun
I chose a fortuitous time to read Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. This is a great book, and a nice compliment to Bryan Ward-Perkins The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. Where Ward-Perkins attempts to convince you that Rome did indeed fall, and that […]
The barbarian invasions, illuminated by genetics
My own comprehension or understanding of the fall of Rome and the barbarian invasions probably began when I was about nine years old when I read a book about the various peoples who crashed the gates of civilization. First and foremost in the various descriptions were the Huns, a mysterious and fearsome race who in […]
Disruptive ages happen…and they happen fast
A friend of mine was pointing out that there is something of an anti-civilizational polemic in Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. It’s the same sort of impulse which also asserts that “Rome never fell it evolved” and that the “Dark Ages” is a myth. I pretty much agree with Scott […]
Roman cultural history has almost no demographic imprint
Several friends have asked that I weigh in the recent dust-up between Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mary Beard. I haven’t for a few reasons. First, I can’t really be bothered to go incognito and see every detail of Taleb’s argument, as he has me blocked on Twitter (he called me a fucking idiot or something […]
When Rome fell civilization did decline
Before the Holidays I mentioned that I was rereading Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. Why do I hold this book in such high esteem? Because of figures such as the one to the left. Granted, this chart is not from The Fall of Rome, but that book has an […]