Kosmo

Latin word order is pretty crazy with a theoretical Subject Indirect-Object Direct-Object Adverb Verb order. I think it's surprising how spreaded Latin was given how hard it is to master.

Dienekes is one of the my favorite blogs about genetic history, together with Evo and Proud http://evoandproud.blogspot.ro/ Cochran's West Hunter http://westhunt.wordpress.com/ and Razib Khan's blog at Unz Review http://www.unz.com/gnxp/

Nice to see you too Aurelia.

How you've all been? When I noticed UNRV messages in my email I got a bit of a shock. Good to see that it's still active. I haven't read about roman history in a long time. These days I'm more focused on East Asian cultures and I'm trying to understand all the new information coming from genetics studies about various migrations and admixtures, but I have to admit the genetics lingo often hurts my brain.

Oh, Gods. no, no, no!!!

"As the novelist George Orwell observed, he who controls the past controls the future, so it is perhaps not surprising that Orwell

I wonder when and how the strict monogamy promoted by Christians replaced both the polygyny allowed by Judaism and the serial monogamy enabled by divorce, that Romans favored. Valentinian I divorced in 370 AD Severa, mother of Gratian, and married Justina, mother of Valentinian II.

Historians speak about most land property, during the hellenistic era, being public and only the right to collect taxes from local communities belonging to private individuals, cities, kings or temples. This kind of free populations that had to give a part of their products was known under many names, but mostly as "pariakoi" This is not about the private property that someone held, but, about the rights that some had to collect tribute from peaseants that had a status between free men and slaves. Some historians evan call them "serfs". My question is, when and how this type of property was converted to the full land ownership that we see during the Roman Empire?. In fact, the situation was similar in Europe where the tribal aristocracy was not based on large proprieties worked with slaves or hired labour, but on rights to collect taxes from peasants.

An epic rant by David Mitchell about archaeologists finding the remains of Richard III

The archives of more than 1,200 journals are now available for limited free reading by the public, JSTOR announced today. Anyone can sign up for a JSTOR account and read up to three articles for free every two weeks. This is a major expansion of the Register & Read program, following a 10-month test, during which more than 150,000 people registered for access to an initial set of 76 journals. The new additions bring more than 4.5 million articles from nearly 800 scholarly societies, university presses, and academic publishers into the Register & Read offerings.

JSTOR did not pursue any charges towards him, so it was basically a victimless crime. And for the persecution to ask for such a harsh punishment for academic articles is ridiculous.

Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages. The family includes English and most other European languages, as well as Persian, Hindi and many others. Despite the importance of the languages, specialists have long disagreed about their origin. Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European,were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword. The new entrant to the debate is an evolutionary biologist, Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 103 Indo-European languages and computationally walked them back in time and place to their statistically most likely origin. The result is that

A.D. 79 was a rough year for Marcus Cerrinius Vatia. The up-and-coming young man was running for the important office of aedile, one of the two junior magistrates in the seaside town of Pompeii. A century earlier, the Roman orator Cicero had admired the generally honest and upright campaigns conducted in this provincial town on the Bay of Naples. Unlike in Rome itself, where corruption was rampant, any hardworking Pompeian man with enough money and friends might rise to the office of aedile

Ancient siege techniques are brought back in use but some times they backfire

HERCULANEUM, Italy

It would be interesting to know the number of american victims assaulted by american soldiers and how it compares. Anyway, even 12000 rapes by americans in Germany is not that much compared with an estimated 2 millions done by the Red Army. Other WW2 examples of mass rapes are the Rape of Nanjing committed by the Japanese Army in the Chinese capital and the rampage done by French soldiers from Morocco after the Battle of Monte Cassino in Ciociaria region of Latium. The difference is not only in scale, but in attitude. There is a huge difference between crimes committed in times of war and dealt with by military justice and the situation when the Army itself unleashes the soldiers on the civilian population like the Russians and the Japanese did.

I can't find the images. Help! I'm over 18. Pinky swear.

Carthage looks amazing.

This is a bold statement. Dacian was used in Antiquity and still is used as the name of a distinct people with a distinct culture. The relations between various North Thracian tribes: Dacians, Getae and Moesians are unclear and it is posibile that Dacians and Getae were two names for the same tribe or two different, but closely related tribes. Also, I have to point that romantic notions about Dacians, either as works of art, or under the guise of the pseudo-science of thracology, were embraced by other Romanians before and after Ceausescu and his national-communist protochronism and they are a part of romanian nationalism. For example: Eminescu and the other romantics wrote many poems about them in the 19th century, Lucian Blaga wrote a play Zamolxis, A Pagan Mystery in 1921. Mircea Eliade published in exile his studies De Zalmoxis

It is absurd to believe that Dacians had a monopoly over the simple idea of imitating coins, but I've also seen no evidence in the article that the imitations found outside the areas of Dacian influence, e.g. south of the Balkan mountains, are minted there and not imports from silver-rich Dacia. Also, local Thracian/Celts could follow a Dacian model without the presence of a Dacian population (if a Dacian identity would even make sense in a Thracian context) Thracians imitating Dacian imitations of Roman coins.

ROME

When the walls were breached the attackers could better use their superiority in numbers and fight on equal terms, but that was no guarantee of victory. The forces of Demetrios Poliorcetes breached the walls of Rhodes and fortified themselves in the theater, but were isolated and defeated by the defenders who would later build the Colossus in celebration. During the Second Siege of Vienna Ottoman forces penetrated the city, but the garrison successfully hold them up until the German-Polish relief army defeated the Ottoman Army outside the walls. Napoleon broke through the walls of Acre, but failed to take the city because a second wall was hastily built inside by the Ottomans to block his forces. Even in The Lord of the Rings, after the outer defenses of Helm's Deep fell to the orcs of Insengard, the Rohirrim resisted sometime in Hornburg before launching a cavalry counterattack. During the Battle of Minas Tirith the forces of Sauron broke through the Great Gate, but to take the city they would have had to take 6 other internal gates because of how the White City was built.

ON a warm day in Plovdiv (Philippopolis in Roman times, or the City of Seven Hills to those who walk them today), I took respite in a park where a chunk of ancient colonnade served as a bench on which to eat greasy, cheesy banitza, the local pastry special. Along for the journey was my friend Mia Agova, daughter of Assen Agov, the Bulgarian politician famous for his role in the democratic movement that helped free the country from Communism. Mia had come down from Sofia hoping to find the spot where her great-grandfather had been shot and killed in 1925 by the government operatives who considered him a fascist. Hers is not the only Bulgarian family with history in Plovdiv. One of Europe

I think that the best explanation for Poles and Finns is the absence of analysis for Eastern Europe. Finnish is linguistically related with other Uralic languages like Estonian and they may have a genetic relation as well. Polish people should be more related with Lithuanians, Belorussians and Rhutenians from deep historical connections. Anyway, I find this type of studies troubling because they try to overlap a biological community to a cultural one.

Happy Birthday!