Thread 18061792

I'll start :
>that time a bunch of Greeks teamed up and built a rich colonial enterprise that outlasted Ancient Greece by five centuries
how the fuck did they do it?

>>18061792 (OP)
By being extremely culturally distinct from the surrounding peoples they could maintain a sort of sociopolitical coherence.
To put it this way, Greeks were more similar to Romans than they were to Scythians. Thus, integrating fully with Scythians would be harder and take longer or not really happen at all.
City life and mercantilism is extremely different to pastoralism where one travels perhaps hundreds of miles just for subsistence of their flocks.

>>18061792 (OP)
>>18061831
to expand on this, the Greek cities in the Chersonesos filled a specific niche in the region that couldn't easily be replaced.
They facilitated trade between the pastoralist steppe dwellers and the wider mediterranean. No one was doing this before them, so they filled the niche first. And the Scythians were not equipped to challenge them on this, from a cultural skillset perspective. Any Scythians that did settle with the Greek simply became Greek because at that point, mercantile city life was synonymous with Greekness AS OPPOSED to Scythianness.

I like how there was a small Crimean community using some dialect of Gothic as late as XVIII century.

>>18061831
>>18061850
still, one _would_ assume that the Scythians and later Sarmatians could have eventually worked a way to plunder the Bosporan Greeks, as it is much more within their cultural skillset, and simply assume a new trade partner would come and fill the void. I know the Sardinians tried — and failed epically — to do the same plunder and pillage route with the Punics, and the Ligurians were not shy of trying their hands at siegeing Massalia to get that sweet immediate revenue. What made the Scythians/Sarmatians so reticent to do so, even at their obvious geopolitical cost?

>>18061930
Horses eat a lot and drastically reduce your ability to maintain a siege, especially against sea ports.
Genghis Khan was able to successfully sack so many cities because he specifically gathered all the best engineers from his empire to build advanced siege engines (as well as capitalizing on terror to provoke surrenders).

The Pontic Greek community in the Black Sea was destroyed in the Greek genocide.

Who got them? The goths?

>>18061792 (OP)
You tapped in how the Georgian Bragationi dynasty are potentially descended from the Roman client-kings of this kingdom?

>>18061930
Wasn't is Cimmerians > Sarmatians > Scythians?

>>18062262
Goths lived in the country surrounding the cities, the cities survived but fell to obscurity after numerous Turkic raids that depopulated them

>>18062728
Like many dynasties of the Caucasus, Bagratids are descendants of various Iranian nobility and/or Zoroastrian nobility native to the region. After all Armenians were majority Zoroastrian even after a while the initial conversion of their nobility, and so was Georgia. In fact there are still Georgian semi-pagans such as the Khevsur

>>18062262
Looked into it and it seems that it eventually came under Byzantine control/influence

>>18062939
Yes, both the Armenian and Georgian Bagratids had Arsacid descent. The Bosporan Tiberian-Julian dynasty is particularly interesting because they were a mix of Roman, Greek, and Iranian ancestry that included a daughter of Mark Antony (or one of his brothers), multiple diadochi lines (mostly the Seleucids), Thracian kings, and the paternal line goes back to the Acahemenids. Not all of the lines can be definitively proven as it is a descent from antiquity, which are very controversial, but if they could be verified it would be remarkable.
The link to the Bagtatids is Nana of Iberia who was the wife of King Mirian III of Iberia. Her father was reportedly a Tiberian-Julian Bosporan king.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nana_of_Iberia

This doesn't have Nana's ancestry but still shows how far back other lines can be traced
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_monarchs_family_tree_from_antiquity_to_united_Georgia

>>18061930
>Punics
lolwut

>>18062253
nobody cares really

>>18062922
Scythians>Sarmatians
Roxolani and Yaziges were of the same stock but further west

I find it slightly odd that the Greeks conquered and colonised the entire Mediterranean and middle east, some areas such as Anatolia, southern Italy, and the Crimea very intensely, yet through the long process of history, greek culture has only survived in it's original homeland.

>>18062253
And by the communists

>>18064099
A tragedy

>>18064099
It did take hundreds of years for places like Trebizond and Magna Graecia to become minority Greek, and some Greeks still live in the latter to this day

>>18064099
After peaking diring the hellenistic period, the various greeks got conquered or assimilated by other empires, and being mainly urbanized, they couldn't outreproduce fast enough. Mainland Greece itself was depopulated several times during the middle ages through wars and plagues, and the Byzantines often had to relocate Greeks from Anatolia and Italy to repopulate it

>>18061851
Using the Greek alphabet no less

>>18064099
Slavs use Cyrillic, Turks don't even have their own placenames and all their tourism goes to Greek ruins, the Bible is written in Greek by Hellenized neckbeards, table fork was Byzantine, Gregorian chants used Byzantine notation, etc

It's mostly that you don't see it

>>18065623
And the places you mentioned had and still have some villages up until the modern age. Even Egypt/Alexandria had had hundred something thousand Greeks living there until relatively recently.

>>18061930
Usefulness, why attack people that contribute alot of money. That connect you to buyers and sellers across the medditernean. That's just dumb. Trade with them. Allow then some indeodence and they prove to be useful and not cause problems. Keep them around.

>>18064099
Cyprus had its own very non-Greek state in the bronze age and was divided in antiquity between Greeks, Phoenicians, and locals
it's the colony that survived

>>18064099
Thry git absorbed?

>>18061792 (OP)
this bothers me

>>18061792 (OP)
>There are still five-digit populations of people in two remote areas of southern Arabia that speak a modern form of Old South Arabian (Razihi and Faifi)
>The sultanate of Oman once controlled about half of the Eastern African coast
>One Arab-black guy called Tippu Tip randomly founded a massive empire in the Kongo rainforest based on his personality and trading slaves
>Some guy called Samo created an empire in Europe that disappeared into thin air upon his death
>The Carthaginians lost Sardinia because some mercenaries revolted and took over the whole island, then Rome swooped in to claim it; the main force of mercenaries were later starved to death in a canyon
>Some pirates randomly took over the entire island of Gotland, which gave the Teutonic knights of Prussia a pretext to take over the island
>Christopher II of Denmark mortgaged his entire kingdom to various German magnates, and after his death there was no king at all from 1332-1340
>The Bahamas was a pirate republic from 1706 to 1718
>Afghanistan was once ruled by Greek Buddhists, known as the Greco-Bactrian kingdom
>White people who spoke a now-extinct language called Tocharian lived in Western China
>A Nestorian Christian missionary presented Christianity to the Emperor of China at Xi'an in the year 635, and their religion flourished there until it was wiped out by persecution around 845, but some obscure evidence suggests their beliefs continued in some areas into the 1600s
>There is evidence that at least some of the Bible was translated into both Sassanian Persian and Nubian languages in ancient times, but Arabic remains an open question
>Those who claim to be Jews today have no connection to the ancient or biblical Jews
>Around 260 million people natively speak "Southwestern Mandarin," which contains further sub-dialects that are not comprehensible to each other, and is incomprehensible to those who only speak standard Beijing Mandarin, although sometimes counted as "the same language"

>>18066838
>About half a million people still speak Neo-Aramaic today
>The "Raj of Sarawak" was founded by some white guy called James Brooke who was a professional adventurer. His kingdom eventually merged with British North Borneo.
>The Uyghur Khaganate was completely destroyed because one random siberian tribe on their periphery decided to attack them and burn their cities in the year 840. The aftereffects of this also caused the adjacent (even more massive) Tibetan Empire to completely collapse two years later, leading to the "era of fragmentation" and completely ending their golden age forever
>A huge region of the Mediterranean Sea is under Greek control because of a tiny Greek-controlled island off the southern coast of Turkey called Castellorizo
>An empire larger than the state of Texas was completely destroyed because Morocco sent a single army across the Sahara to obtain gold (that didn't even exist). In the attempt to find this gold, the Moroccan army defeated the Songhai empire in a single battle by setting off a cattle stampede, causing their entire empire to collapse
>The Oyo and Ashanti "empires" in West Africa came into existence and were built up for the sole purpose of selling other African tribes as slaves to foreign trade ships

>>18066842
>There is a distinct Germanic language spoken today by 20 people in Poland called Wymysorys, not intelligible with any dialect of German language and with its own unique literary history
>There is a pictographic script called "Ersu Shaba script" where picto-glyphs are drawn in a picture frame and read clockwise from the center. The different colors of glyphs also change their meaning. Only about a dozen priests of the Ersu people, in Southwestern China, can now read and write this script.
>Sheng Shicai, the quasi-independent leader of Chinese Xinjiang, signed a secret agreement with Stalin in 1940, handing full military control of the entire province to the USSR. He also offered to make Xinjiang the 18th Soviet Republic of the USSR in 1941, but the offer was declined by Stalin.
>Tamerlane's 14th century tomb was opened by Soviet archaeologists just three days before the Nazi invasion of the USSR began. An inscription was revealed on the inside of the tomb that said, "whoever opens this tomb will unleash an invader more terrible than I."

>>18066842
>The Uyghur Khaganate was completely destroyed because one random siberian tribe on their periphery decided to attack them and burn their cities in the year 840. The aftereffects of this also caused the adjacent (even more massive) Tibetan Empire to completely collapse two years later, leading to the "era of fragmentation" and completely ending their golden age forever
Have a source on this, and the fall of the Tibetan Empire in general? I usually think of it as being a king who persecuted Buddhism + a succession crisis over who succeeded him + the place's geography making big empires tough in general, I didn't know anything about the Uyghur collapse as a catalyst (though I guess anarchy on the northern frontier can't have helped)

>>18066844
>Sheng Shicai, the quasi-independent leader of Chinese Xinjiang, signed a secret agreement with Stalin in 1940, handing full military control of the entire province to the USSR. He also offered to make Xinjiang the 18th Soviet Republic of the USSR in 1941, but the offer was declined by Stalin.
Hilariously, he wound up falling out with the CCP and spent his retirement exiled in Taiwan
(though honestly I get the sense that he was more a warlord trying to kiss up to whoever was important in the region to maintain his own grip on power than an ideological communist... or an ideological nationalist for that matter)

>>18061792 (OP)
The existence of Egypt as an independent nation was ended for like 2000 years because the Egyptians wanted to curry favor with Caesar by killing Pompey. I like this one because of just how big of a miscalculated fuck up it was.

>>18061792 (OP)
i will always be bitter about how john wilkes booth shot lincoln AND ALSO george atzerodt pussied out of shooting johnson
if booth's gun had jammed, or if atzerodt had shot johnson like he was supposed to, johnson wouldn't have been able to sabotage reconstruction like he did, and the south could have caught up to the rest of civilization and it might not have stayed the shithole that it's been

>>18064091
>t. roach

>>18066838
>>A Nestorian Christian missionary presented Christianity to the Emperor of China at Xi'an in the year 635, and their religion flourished there until it was wiped out by persecution around 845
Weren't there were Nestorians in China through the Yuan? It was only the xenophobic Ming who eradicated them.