I had a difficult time placing these sites (even with the Tigris-Euphrates) in a larger world context (like, "how large is this area?", and "relative to all Roman area").
So, I made a graphic that may be mildly helpful. [1]
Based on a quick check, these best I could find was the fort at Circesium (known as the "farthest fortress" (φρούριον ἔσχατον) of the Romans), which apparently existed by 256 AD. [2] However, the Roman Empire was basically over by 256 AD, and was in the process of splitting into West-East (Crisis of the Third Century[3]) and had likely already formed the breakaway Palmyrene Empire [4] ruled over by Zenobia.
All locations have therefore been placed on a map of the Palmyrene Empire (circa 271 AD) relative to Palmyra, Jerusalem, Petra, Cyprus, and similar well known locations. Map was made using the last Figure image from [5], the Palmyrene Empire Map from [6] and a Distort to 3-pt Edessa, Nisibis, and Zenobia.
> However, the Roman Empire was basically over by 256 AD
Instability during the crisis of the third century was not the end of the Empire in the slightest; especially considering that the Palmyrene Empire lasted hardly more than a single decade before it was reconquered by the Romans who held on to it for centuries longer.
The comment is in reference to the generally held height of Ancient Rome being ~100 AD. Afterward, largely 2nd order downward. This Wikipedia gif illustrates. [1]
The crisis article and late antiquity articles note:
> The crisis resulted in such profound changes in the empire's institutions, society, economic life, and religion that it is increasingly seen by most historians as defining the transition between the historical periods of classical antiquity and late antiquity.
> Diocletian (Emp: 284 AD), who began the custom of splitting the Empire into Eastern and Western portions ruled by multiple emperors simultaneously.
The Roman Empire was effectively broken, and mostly just oscillated until the final West-East break. It was already "customarily" split in two by 284 AD.
I read somewhere that the Roman Empire has not ended. It just morphed into the Catholic Church and has had various emanations(Austro-Hungarian empire) since then. One of the reason Christianity was chosen as the main religion was that it emphasized "turning the cheek" and followers already believed in one power, so it was thought that it would be easier to rule the masses this way.
Tangently Related: The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was the biggest mislabeling of human history - neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, not a Nation and not really German.
Thank you for these resources! The map in particular is very illustrative, I was having a hard time forming a mental image of the area in question without one.
The red square region is an image artifact of the overlay process. If you check the paper linked, there's a legend in the original image, which was then copied over to the combined image. I also discuss the image combining process a bit in the same comment.
Both sets of data were taken by image filtering the lower half of [1] for grey-black colors [(forts)], deleting all remaining imagery, transposing the image onto [2] using Photoshop, and then using Edit->Transform->[Scale,Distort] to image fit to a 3-point fit of Edessa, Nisibis, and Zenobia.
> In addition, many of the likely Roman forts we have documented in this study have already been destroyed by recent urban or agricultural development, and countless others are under extreme threat.
How does this happen? Do you just see a bunch of ruins on your land and think "well if it was important people would know about it! Let's toss all this stuff in dumpster!"?
I can't imagine how many things went down like that. Large Dinosaur repositories and people trying to plant some vegetables were like "geez another bunch of bones. Alright, into the fire"
Construction involving digging is nearly impossible in most European cities because it's impossible to dig without hitting ruins. Rural areas aren't that much better. And it all has SOME historic value.
For the most part, now it's 'take pictures, grab anything that looks particularly interesting, and bulldoze on'.
At some point, especially if you're a random not-super-wealthy farmer in the middle of nowhere, you have to go 'fuck it, whatever' or you're going to not get anything done.
> 'take pictures, grab anything that looks particularly interesting, and bulldoze on'
I've seen archeological survey like this. They explored construction site to ~1m depth. Found few things and went away. Then construction continued - in the depth of 2m vaults of (probably) gothic cellar appeared. Workers took few bricks home and continued with constructions of foundation and underground garage.
When living within any era, it is really hard to appreciate how much of the stuff we value (and what we don't) is just a cultural convention specific to that era (and with a high degree of arbitrariness).
People historically would routinely recycle anything of value and reusability. What has survived from previous times is more or less by accident (too bulky, too hidden etc.)
The idea of trying to preserve historical artifacts seems to be entirely modern, but even that concept has evolved alot. In the 19th century people did not think twice about mutilating and removing pieces to remote museums or "restoring" sites purely speculatively.
I suspect that there have been people in every age who valued, preserved, and studied material remains of the past. At a broad social and cultural level, however, you are correct.
Thanks for that - never heard of Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum before. Amazing to think that ~2,500 years ago, they had artifacts on exhibit that were already ~1,500 years old at that time. And labels in three different languages - all they were missing was the audio guide!
You don't see any ruins. You see a slight bumps in terrain or grass patches that turn yellow a few days earlier each year. Only taking a picture from hundreds of feet above, with favorable lighting when shadows are long reveals regular rectangles, old plough marks and shapes of buildings that were leveled thousands years ago earlier. People like Podebard would come back to the same places for years just to catch that ideal conditions and discover additional detail or missed structures that were not visible on any previous picture.
Somewhat; Tim Traveler recently visited a 5,000-year-old dolmen in France, and it's preserved, but treated like any other small roadside attraction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S6wP8ox1R4
I can't really watch the video but a dolmen in France is just a small roadside attraction, there are so many and they are usually on private property, you can't build a museum and visitors center around every single dolmen.
One of the big sources of new runestone discoveries in Sweden is "load bearing part of someone's basement" (and that similarly some amount of the Acropolis turns up as having been used as construction material.)
This is human tradition, especially urban tradition. To raise the elevation of the city, and reuse the prior construction as the foundation and basement of the next. The old town in Naples has a section that is contoured in a half-circle arc to align with a Roman amphitheater that now serves as its foundation. Reduce reuse recycle used to be taken much more seriously. :)
In most of Europe (and probably elsewhere), you can’t throw a rock without hitting some sort of historically significant thing.
We used to smoke weed on the local Roman wall. It was also a popular destination for rock climbers to practice. The wall has been there for 2000 years. It’s fine.
a great example is the Rosetta Stone, a 2000 year old tablet that contained 3 translations of a proclamation by the King (Ptolemy V). It was discovered in Egypt by Napoleon's army and for the first time in the modern day allowed ancient Egyptian writing to be deciphered and read.
my favorite part of the story is, when the Rosetta Stone was discovered, it had been considered rubble and was being used as one of the bricks in some more recent construction.
I remember going to a museum and seeing a 150 year old tool (a cant hook) that was in worse shape than the identical version my father had in his garage and was still using as a tool.
Time scales are much larger of course, but at some point these are just "old things" to the people involved.
Certain groups of islamofascists intentionally destroyed known artifacts, ruins and even excavated and preseved sites like Palmyra during earlier stages of the Syrian Civil War.
Also in areas that are in war time conflicts, or in poverty, preserving may not be a top priority.
For example Gaza is the site of many historic cities dating thousands of years old.
Yes. Altruism does not scale. It is very likely they thought, “oh, this is some old looking shit but doesn’t look that important. Better clean it up quickly before the preservationists come in and bankrupt this project.”
This still happens today. For example, city walls of Moscow were started to be dismantled in 19th century and whatever left was destroyed by the communists after revolution. To widen the roads in the center of the city the communists demolished 18th and 19th century historical buildings (luckily some other buildings were just moved away using rails).
Also new construction sometimes happens in the center and you cannot build something new without destroying a part of history first.
It's a bunch of stones. How would anyone know whether it was 200 years old or 2000? You can't ask archeologists in for every old cowshed built by your great grandfather!
>The first CORONA satellites had a single camera, but a two-camera system was quickly implemented.[40] The front camera was tilted 15° aft, and the rear camera tilted 15° forward, so that a stereoscopic image could be obtained
There are different ways to do it, that's one of them.
A lot of the techniques were first used with airplanes, then later with satellites. Lots of overlap because planes allowed for easier localization and better resolution, especially earlier on in remote sensing.
I've done this from a plane before and got some very epic 3D images. I think Mt. Rainier at sunset was one of the best. So yeah, the easy way if your camera is on a moving platform, is take a shot, count three aligators, then take another shot.
I find stereo pair aerial imagery hugely helpful in understanding terrain. While Google Earth is great to get a gross overview, our eyes are much better at inferring sub-meter detail from pairs of stereo photos, e.g. from a single airplane taken a few seconds apart.
I thought the declassification of US government documents was 25 years. Or I guess there's an exemption when it comes to military intelligence? I wonder where and when the data was collected.
The data has been available for quite a while, but available is different from usable:
> While challenges involved in spatially correcting these unusual panoramic film images has long served as a stumbling block to researchers, an online tool called “Sunspot” now offers a straightforward process for efficient and accurate orthorectification of CORONA, helping to unlock the potential of this historical imagery for global-scale archaeological prospection. With these new opportunities come significant new challenges in how best to search through large imagery datasets like that offered by CORONA.
You're right I should've looked more closely, but I was just wondering about what it said towards the end of the article about U2 spy photographs and what's becoming declassified.
> After 25 years, declassification review is automatic with nine narrow exceptions that allow information to remain as classified. At 50 years, there are two exceptions, and classifications beyond 75 years require special permission.[0]
The nine exemptions can be found at the Justice Department's website[1].
The amount of available documents has skyrocketed in recent past, especially for present-day history, and they're not always easily usable. For instance, if your interested in the Stalin administration, there are millions of orders, notes, studies and transmissions stored in boxes somewhere. If you were a historian in that time period, studying new documents, a lifetime would only let you see a very tiny fraction of existing sources.
Remember these movies where a small-firm lawyer is hammered with tons of document boxes in a discovery process against a big corporation? Well, historians are like that, but they have less money and they don't know how many boxes there are. Also they have to look for the boxes themselves rather than them being delivered at their office.
In older, well-studied fields there are few boxes, they are already referenced, and historians have a chance to see everything over their career. In more recent, less studied fields, there are countless unopened boxes.
I'm not a big proponent of LLM proliferation, but I was thinking that mass review of tons of scanned documents might be exactly the sort of thing they're really useful for. Given an AI that hasn't been ruthlessly tuned to be as politically neutral as possible, you could have a huge database and query it in plain English like "were there any documents that made overt reference to extremely corrupt behavior?"
People with the knowhow to do this kind of stuff are mostly busy trading eyeballs or stock, and college history departments are not exactly rolling in it.
Still, there is an effort made to make these collections more easily avaialble. For instance, in the case of soviet archives, [1] describes the work done and the conditions to access. That work is far from exhaustive though, and a large part of the stuff still needs to be done the slow way, or require special requests in order to be accessed.
To answer a query, your LLM needs to "read" the documents first. The context window will not be big enough for this, so you have to fine tune the model.
Problem is, you need to cross-check with the reference material in case it's subject to hallucinations.
Oh, I was thinking that the cross-checking is the point. You'd use the LLM as a "hazily thinking search function" to narrow your examination of old documents, not as a replacement for reading the documents.
I don't know what to do about the context window, though.
Maybe it's just analog to digital conversion. Some stuff only gets used for research after some digitization project since it's not really searchable on a more global scale otherwise. Could be completely wrong here of course.
" In August 1974, the Joint Chiefs of Staff destroyed all the minutes and transcripts of their meetings going back to 1947, and in 1978 essentially stopped keeping any such records. Only 30 pages of notes have survived, much to the dismay of military historians and scholars of the Cold War."
So, like, we will never get the discussions around, say, them using smallpox against North Korea.
>25X7 – reveal information that would impair the current ability of U.S. government officials to protect the President, Vice President, and other protectees for whom protection services, in the interest of national security, are authorized;
Like that scene from the JFK movie where Donald Sutherland's character is going through a long check list of all the things the secret service would have done.
Like, snipers on roof tops, planning the route so there's no slow downs, etc.
> (6) reveal information, including foreign government information, that would cause serious harm to relations between the United States and a foreign government, or to ongoing diplomatic activities of the United States;
The quality of those images (from 50-60 years ago) really makes me wonder what level of quality/detail can satellite imagery reach (particularly us government spy satellites).
Astronomical telescopes use active mirrors for atmosphere compensations - maybe a satellite could do the same to get a clearer image, just pointing the other direction ?
It does, but it’s the kind of problem you can throw computation at, along with adaptive optics. If you remember that photo Trump released, that was from a KH-11, which launched in the 70s (Hubble reused some of the design to save money) and they it generating data in the gigabit range back then so I’d imagine they have a high enough frame rate that you could get many frames to interpolate even for a moving subject.
They pour a LOT of money into that kind of capability so I’d be hesitant to say it’s impossible 50 years later.
That structure seems really large. But it’s really sharp and I’d say within an order of magnitude of reading license plates. Doesn’t seem like a stretch to think they can go to higher resolutions.
Makes me wonder how much information and insights can be gleaned from data that's just out there in the public domain. Can generative AI help with data-mining and extracting interesting and new things like this?
> In addition, many of the likely Roman forts we have documented in this study have already been destroyed by recent urban or agricultural development, and countless others are under extreme threat
How many of them are now destroyed due to US bombing?
In general, ruins in the middle of the desert don't tend to be bombing targets. The vast majority of them will have been destroyed by construction or farms.
The Eastern front of the Roman Empire is full of surprises. One fact that always impresses me is that one of the largest hippodromes in the Roman Empire is found in modern-day Tyr, in the South of Lebanon. The entire region is dotted with Roman presence.
The area was heavily urbanised before Rome was around, it stands to reason that it remained relevant throughout the Roman Empire (to the point of being the Roman Empire after the slow collapse of the Western administration).
Probably more than Rome now, but even so at the time they were not quite powerful militarily. The Phoenician never succeeded in building an empire or a military power. Carthage was the "best" and even them they sucked much comparing to the Roman/Italians. Carthage itself didn't have a military but hired mercenaries. The Phoenicians are a bunch of rich merchants and they probably re-arranged themselves in the new empire.
I think they are vastly underestimated.
For instance their navy and how they were building ships in a industrial manner is impressive. ( sourcing ready made parts from different specialized places)
But clearly those guys were not empire builder. They would probably have been happy to keep being a Roman protectorate after the Punic wars.
They were still making tons of money via the Iberia trades.
Like they did under the Egyptian or the Assyrian.
Something I still don’t quiet grasp is why we have so little direct written account. They invented those letters ffs.
the barycenter of human civilization has lingered over this broader area for millennia. It is sad that in modern times it never managed to gain at least some basic stability, if not a revival and renewed contributions to the human storybook.
maybe its the curse of the oil. maybe its something else.
Well, you're looking at 4000 year time scale. There were large periods of time throughout where there was stability over wide parts of it over the scale of decades or even centuries.
In recent history it's largely due to the Sykes-Picot agreement. The Ottoman Empire fell at a time when nationalism was arising and empires were going out of favor. In that power vacuum, inaccurate lines were drawn in the sand by colonial powers with little stake in life in the region. Since then every nation carved out of the area has been fighting over anything and everything because historically the area was ruled by large empires rather than the nation-states that were arbitrarily drawn there now. The history of the area is so old and intertwined that every country there has a claim of something on the other side of their borders within spitting distance. Western Europe had similar issues when the Western Roman Empire collapsed.
Funny, most people in the West seem unaware of the numerous Islamic attacks and messianic dreams of Islam. The ottoman empire was also a Muslim empire...again something people seem to forget about.
And don't get me started on the Muslim tradition of enslaving everyone.
There is some weird kind of selective amnesia in the west, we at the same time downplay our achievements and put the focus on our perceived errors. While everybody else is doing the exact opposite, so not only we teach our kids to hate themselves we give good reasons for others to do so as well.
It's as if the only empires that existed were Europeean and the only slaves that existed were from the atlantic trade
Ironic given how basically every civilisation did similar things, Europeans were just better at it for a small time but before them Arabs had a good go at it too, not even mentioning the Chinese empire. The whole world and its history is a shit show, just because you're at the tip of one of the remaining branch doesn't mean you have to hate your country and everything it did.
What about the pan-African and Mesoamerican traditions of enslaving everyone? Slavery was pretty much everywhere in the world. Then Christians invented the idea of not enslaving fellow Christians, then Muslims did the same (which really helped the spread of both religions!).
Mathematically speaking, you reading this are the descendant of enslaved peoples. They could be so far back that it doesn’t affect your economic status, like being a Mamluk in Egypt, or a Carthaginian in Rome, or a Hebrew in Egypt. But all of humanity was touched by this non-peculiar institution.
The Arab slave trade was huge and racist in its own way (where poorer, usually darker skinned peoples were enslaved and traded by wealthier, lighter skinned peoples.) Western European colonial ambitions definitely wounded the area significantly but the Islamicate world was still practicing slavery after Western Europe had largely banned it and stopped practicing it. It's recent enough in Islamicate history that traditionalist groups lay claim to slavery as a custom even now in the region.
European messianic dreams is an interesting way to describe three religions that all originated and were exported from from this general region, not in Europe.
the causes might be viciously debatable and challenged but the lost opportunity (versus a counterfactual universe where there is less strife and destruction and more coherence and construction) is quite tangible. one can only hope that the recent past is not the exact predictor of the future.
So, I made a graphic that may be mildly helpful. [1]
Based on a quick check, these best I could find was the fort at Circesium (known as the "farthest fortress" (φρούριον ἔσχατον) of the Romans), which apparently existed by 256 AD. [2] However, the Roman Empire was basically over by 256 AD, and was in the process of splitting into West-East (Crisis of the Third Century[3]) and had likely already formed the breakaway Palmyrene Empire [4] ruled over by Zenobia.
All locations have therefore been placed on a map of the Palmyrene Empire (circa 271 AD) relative to Palmyra, Jerusalem, Petra, Cyprus, and similar well known locations. Map was made using the last Figure image from [5], the Palmyrene Empire Map from [6] and a Distort to 3-pt Edessa, Nisibis, and Zenobia.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/dMZiloA.png (map I made)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circesium
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmyrene_Empire
[5] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/wa...
[6] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Empire_o...