Youtube comments of (@premodernist_history).

  1. CORRECTION: The smallpox vaccine is still produced. Long ago I asked my doctor if I could get vaccinated for smallpox, and he said no. Over the intervening twenty years my memory of that degraded from "I'm not allowed to get it" to "They no longer manufacture it." But in fact they do still manufacture it. But it's only provided to select people on a need-to-have basis. Make sure you seek it out before your trip. I don't care if it isn't super easy to transmit. A bout of smallpox is no joke.
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  2. I've been getting a lot of pushback in the comments for my claim that Europeans did not enjoy technological superiority over Africans in the early modern period. Here is a video from HomeTeam History that gives more context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn6xcwn30GU By the way, I know Europe had technologies that other parts of the world didn't have. That's not the point. The point is that Europeans' technologies did not make them OP until the 19th century.
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  3. Swedes didn't invent the wheel either.
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  4. Based on the comments, it appears that some viewers don't understand how colonization of the Americas happened or what the battles between settlers and natives looked like. It wasn't big European field armies with heavy cavalry and artillery going up against bows and arrows. The Europeans were not shipping armies across the ocean to the Americas, and the natives did in fact use firearms from an early date. I recommend watching the video "Indigenous Weapons and Tactics of King Philip's War" on the channel Atun-Shei Films for an example of what the natives were working with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMXKXoA1_gQ
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  5. I suspect it started happening in Ancient Rome. Plutarch and Gellius seem to oversimplify the end of the library by saying Caesar did it. It's an easy and dramatic story so it appealed to people. Then some folks in the Middle Ages blamed the invading Muslims for their own rhetorical purposes. Then Edward Gibbon and Carl Sagan blamed the Christians because of their own bias. It got fictionalized multiple times in different ways.
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  6. I'm actually working on a video that relates to this, but I didn't know about how they did it in Hungary. This was very interesting!
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  7. Servant is also a valid translation. I chose to translate it as slave because to me (as a native English speaker), "servant" sounds like someone who is owed a wage for their work, and I don't think Islam says God owes his creatures a reward for their worship (or rather for their existence, since all people are slaves/servants of God, not just practicing Muslims). That's just my personal perspective. Other people who have other perceptions of the words "servant" and "slave" could legitimately translate it differently. By the way, there is abundant evidence online that English-speaking Muslims translate abd as slave. This isn't just a translation error by a foreigner. Do a search online and see for yourself.
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  8. Also Genghis Khan was the gunman on the grassy knoll.
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  9. They broke all the wheelbarrows so everyone had to start schlepping their stuff around on their heads.
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  10.  @exisfohdr3904  I included footnotes so that you could verify what I said. People at the time literally wrote in their letters, "I'm afraid Adams might beat Washington." Those letters still exist. They've been published and anyone can read them.
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  11. this
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  12. Yes, that was the norm. That was how poor people (i.e. most people) kept warm. Pretty much impossible not to share germs with the animals doing that.
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  13. Very cool! I like that tidbit about namnaho. Chinggis must have used namnaho in his conversation with Changchun. I'm jealous you got to learn Mongolian. That's a language I wish I could learn but will never have the time to. Incidentally, with your background you're probably one of the few Westerners with the linguistic skills necessary to read The Secret History of the Mongols in the original. (For other reading: it was written in Classical Mongolian using Chinese characters used phonetically.) I plan to do more Mongol content in the future, at the very least once a year in November.
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  14. Thanks! I'll have to consider that.
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  15. Great point. No one ever says the Ancient Romans ate rotten meat.
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  16. Thank you!
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  17. That's true, there were black colonizers.
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  18. I know, right? Imagine how different things would be if the US and Russia had stayed friends up to the present. Thank you for the kind words. Believe it or not, when I published this video the channel had 0 subscribers.
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  19. Thanks! I'm glad there's interest. I do plan to do it, but I've got some other videos coming down the pike first.
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  20. Great points
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  21. I love how you think you can just take a rickshaw over open country.
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  22. The verb jahaza (جحظ) means to bulge out or portrude (with regard to eyeballs) or to stare.
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  23.  @burgundian-peanuts  This is what bugs me about the Ted Kaye / NAVA effort to redesign flags. I'm totally fine with them liking some flags and disliking others. Their opinions about flag beauty are just as valid as mine. It's the way they insist on how objectively correct their opinions are, as if they're scientific fact. J.J. McCullough used the word "pseudoscience" to describe their rhetoric, and I think he's right.
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  24. Precisely
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  25. Thanks! These are all great points. About #4, I think epithet is technically correct, but nowadays it has a negative connotation. I'll be touching on #5 in a future video.
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  26. Genghis went to see a play at Ford's Theatre in 1865 and chose violence.
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  27. I suspect if Washington had been in Taft's place in 1912, he would have gladly stepped aside and let Roosevelt have the nomination.
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  28. @Todd Cornell I love the video. I took Mandarin classes in undergrad but I didn't keep it up after graduating. But your narration is slow and clear, great for listening practice. I miss studying Chinese. Such a great language. You have a cool channel. I'm not in the target audience but I can see I can still get a lot out of the cultural observations.
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  29. In the Roman Empire, Christianity spread through the cities first, and the cities were all connected to each other via trade. The rural areas converted later. Our word "pagan" comes from the Latin word "paganus," which means "rural."
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  30. I think you're right. What evidence we have suggests that later head librarians were just political appointees who probably took the job for the pay without caring about scholarship.
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  31. You touch on two important points, each of which would be a good topic for a stand-alone video: (1) The Spanish didn't defeat the Aztecs single-handedly but were in coalition with a very large number of indigenous allies, and (2) The European conquest of the Americas was not total in the early modern period (e.g. the Maya). They would both be important correctives to widely held historical misconceptions. With regard to the second point, it is worth noting that the period in which Europeans and people of European descent finally did attain complete mastery of the Americas was in the late 19th century, in the wake of industrialization. Regarding the Aztecs and Incas, just to clarify -- I'm not saying that they fell simply because of disease. You and I seem to agree that European technology was not an important factor in their fall. I didn't mention the Spaniards' indigenous allies in Mexico in 1519-21 because I was making a wider point about the Americas in general. That said, disease did in fact play a role in the conquests of both the Aztecs and Incas. Tenochtitlan was hit by a smallpox outbreak prior to the final siege, and the Inca civil war you mentioned was precipitated by the Sapa Inca dying of smallpox. (Smallpox was one of the diseases inadvertently introduced from Europe.) Disease in Africa DID hold back the Europeans. They did not go into the interior of Africa until modern drugs started becoming available in the late 19th century. The modern pharmaceutical industry was made possible by industrialization.
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  32.  @stevej71393  The author of the editorial was probably referring to the fact that Britain and France had been on friendly terms with the CSA, while Russia was always solidly pro-Union. That's at least what I recall reading when I was researching this video.
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  33. Yes, that's true! It was an NCO serving in Vietnam.
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  34. Thanks! I agree about Tolkien. All that research he did into ancient languages and literatures gave him a deep well to draw on.
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  35. It was a crazy time. They were definitely in uncharted waters.
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  36. I left it off because of my own ignorance. The wheel was definitely used in India. I just don't know if they also used water transport extensively (outside of Bengal, where I'm confident water transport was king), so I wasn't prepared to go out on a limb and say they used wheeled transport primarily or in combination with water. For all I know they may have used wheeled transport exclusively, in which case I couldn't color it blue on the map. Although I'm pretty sure head porterage was also a thing there.
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  37. I know. For some reason people seem to give historical leaders a pass for doing things we would not approve of otherwise. Thanks for the tip! I hadn't heard of Legend of the Condor Heroes. Looks like it's on YouTube with subtitles, so I'm going to check it out.
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  38. Thank you!
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  39. I wasn't able to find anything either, so I can only speculate. I guess there are probably two advantages to a pottery wheel: You can produce certain forms that aren't possible otherwise, and you can produce at speed. If a community isn't making large quantities of pottery and already has a certain style they like, then the pottery wheel might not seem worth it. I suspect the areas that adopted the pottery wheel were areas of higher population, leading to cities and division of labor (e.g. Mesopotamia, India, China). A machine that allows one to mass produce pottery would make sense there because of the increased demand for pots. In a small village without a complex urbanized economy, the advantages of a pottery wheel might not be fully utilized.
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  40. Yes, exactly.
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  41. Thanks! It's really sad how many people's lives were turned upside down because of the Partition. Yes, that's true about the nasab. Another example is Ibn Taymiyya. I don't know how far back Taymiyya is, but it's a long way.
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  42. Those roads deteriorated after the Roman empire fell. Why weren't white people able to maintain them?
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  43. I love this. Great explanation of the issues involved. A little off topic (because I don't want it to take away from your overall comment, which is awesome), I think your thoughts at the end about my France analogy support my point in an interesting way. I'm guessing you and I would probably agree that we COULD see the Ottomans as a continuation of the Roman empire, if we look at it from the Ottomans' point of view, recognizing that others at the time might well have disagreed with them. When you say republican France is in continuity with the ancien regime, "organic," "integral to the French identity," aren't you doing the same thing? We COULD see the French Republic that way, if we look at it from the republicans' point of view. Would we see it that way if looking from the monarchists' point of view? I'm not saying you're wrong, necessarily. But it seems you're adopting the republican narrative and assuming that opposing French narratives don't exist. It would be like taking the Ottoman definition of "Roman" at face value and ignoring the Byzantines who would have disagreed with them. To paraphrase the video, the French Republic happened, but to call it a continuation of pre-revolutionary France is an interpretation we project onto it. Maybe a mistake in my video was taking for granted my own interpretation of the French Republic (one of rupture rather than continuity with what came before) and not explaining what I meant or why that comparison makes sense to me. But anyway, thank you for summarizing your paper. I enjoyed reading it.
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  44. Yes, good point. The wheel is not as obvious or as simple a machine as some people seem to assume. I've read different things about how many times it was invented. Some say once, some say twice or three times. But the point stands that almost every culture that used the wheel had borrowed it from somewhere else.
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  45. "The most visible name change came in 1934 when Reza Shah -- prompted by his legation in Berlin -- decreed that henceforth Persia was to be known to the outside world as Iran. A government circular explained that whereas "Persia" was associated with Fars and Qajar decadence, "Iran" invoked the glories and birthplace of the ancient Aryans." Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge, 2009), page 86 "In terms of foreign policy, Reza Shah was determined to maintain Iran's independence and to restore its sense of national pride by elevating its stature in the world and insisting it be treated with respect. This was the motivation behind any number of his actions, from insisting on the use of the name Iran instead of Persia to banning photographs of things that were picturesque but might give an impression of backwardness (camels, for example) to breaking off diplomatic relations with countries if its newspapers published unflattering articles about him or his country." Elton L. Daniel, The History of Iran (Greenwood Press, 2001), pages 139-140
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  46. Sounds cool. I wish I could read Polish. I'd probably enjoy his books.
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  47. It's cool that Iceland has held onto its customary naming system, despite the inconveniences when traveling abroad. Scandinavians used to do what Icelanders do but they abandoned the practice and assimilated.
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  48. I don't understand your point. Are you saying the Africans should have used a pottery wheel? Why? It isn't a quality of life thing. Societies with pottery wheels didn't have a better quality of life than ones that didn't. Regarding food production, based on the scholarship I've read, there were environmental constraints to food production. Farming in much of Africa (where the land was arable) had to be low density. In low population, low density communities, I don't see how a mill (to process grain at scale) would be necessary. The lack of a mill wasn't what was holding down the population.
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  49. Thanks! It was just a matter of keeping the video simple, as an intro to the concept. I agree that India does not fit neatly into the chronology I presented (nor do a few other places). It was a generalization. I really just wanted to drive home that European technology was not superior as early as many people think it was. I haven't read Hobsbawm's argument that you reference. I wonder why the British would need to have political/military control of India to be able to undercut the local textile manufacturers. Couldn't they just ensure that local princes would keep their markets open? But admittedly I don't know much about India's economic history. Your point about India being the missing link in European activity in the two hemispheres is a good one, but I think it would have been outside the scope of this video. It'd be worth someone doing a video on it though, because I suspect a lot of folks don't necessarily connect the two in their minds. My impression is that American students are taught about colonialism in North America in isolation, without reference to how it connected to the rest of the globe. Maybe that kind of feeds into the American tendency to see the U.S. as distinct from and disconnected from the rest of the world.
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  50. Sounds like someone is upset that Yakub grafted them.
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  51. Great video! Thank you for going into detail about Head-Smashed-In. That was really fascinating. I love this format of doing a deep dive into an animal resource.
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  52. Thanks!
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  53. The Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations didn't use the wheel. It was also not widely used in Old Kingdom Egypt.
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  54. Thanks for summarizing the state of the field. This was very useful. It is interesting that there could be archaeological evidence for soma in the BMAC. Also, I'm SO jealous you get to own a copy of The World of the Oxus Civilization.
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  55. Improvements in health and medicine were hugely important to population growth. I had a whole five-minute segment on that that I ended up cutting from the video, where I mostly talked about the demographic transition. I thought it made the video too slow and technical, and I wanted to keep things simple. As far as I know there were only a few vaccines available through the 1800s. Urban hygiene started to improve in the late 1800s in some big cities, where they were able to reduce the incidence of GI diseases like cholera and dysentery. A lot more vaccines became available in the early 20th century. Vaccines, hygiene, antibiotics, etc., all had a huge impact on survival rates, and they're mostly 20th-century things. Infant and child mortality plummeted in the 20th century, allowing those kids to grow up and have more kids. Then it took a couple generations for birth rates to drop. I got a PhD in history and taught college for a while. Now I'm a stay-at-home dad. Thank you for the kind words!
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  56. Thank you very much!
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  57. Yes, I think your analogy is accurate. The Alaskans would call themselves American, but people centuries in the future would call them something else. An even better analogy might be California, since Greece and Asia Minor were highly populated in Roman times when the empire was based in Italy. Some of the empire's biggest cities were there, and a lot of the empire's economy and intellectual life were centered there. If the capital were moved to California, and the U.S. lost everything east of, say, Kansas City, I for one would think of it as still the U.S. Interesting you should make that analogy, since the U.S. continuing on in Alaska is sort of implied in the novel Cloud Atlas.
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  58. That's a good idea. I'd be interested in diving into the Aztecs more. I've never heard of the clam gardens but I looked it up. Very interesting. I do plan on doing more on native histories, but probably mostly post-Contact. Anthropology/archaeology is outside my wheelhouse.
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  59. Yeah, that's another great meeting.
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  60. Thanks, I'm glad you liked it.
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  61. @All Hail Chael You're right. The white supremacists are lying to you. They're lying to all of us.
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  62. Congratulations! Maybe by the time I upload again you'll have a kid.
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  63. If what they're after is something like what Chicago has but for the whole state, then they should go with the Illinois Centennial flag. Same designer.
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  64.  @junkmail5283  Wait, is this a StarCraft reference?
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  65. The Arabs may have "had" the wheel, but they didn't use it to transport goods. You'd know that if you had watched the video. I have no idea what you mean by an agenda.
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  66. Thanks!
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  67. They didn't.
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  68. Thank you!
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  69. Thanks! No, pottery wheels weren't used in sub-Saharan Africa.
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  70. I feel the same way when studying history. The more one learns about the past, the more one realizes how little one knows.
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  71.  @bobbytran3878  This has sent me down a rabbit hole. I didn't realize there is so much Chinese historical fiction translated into English. Louis Cha is quite prolific.
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  72. Hi, thank you for your kind words. The prejudice surrounding the video title that I was aiming at wasn't so much white-on-black racism as simply eurocentrism. I initially just found the question innately interesting, which is why I researched it. But then I reflected that we never ask this sort of question about Europe. We never ask, "Why did it take so long for Europeans to borrow paper and printing from Asia?" or "Why weren't their cities more like Southeast Asian cities?" There seems to be an implicit bias of regarding Europe as the default version of history against which the history of everywhere else is compared. Moreover, I don't think it's possible to address the question without interrogating that bias. Why would it even cross our minds to ask that question? It's because wheels were used in Europe. Why do we never ask why Europe didn't have a technology the Asians had? If I had only done the second part of the video, the video would have been incomplete. Regarding racism, As I recall I only reference racism at the very beginning when I say that Africans had other technologies so we can rule out their being unable to use technology. My sarcastic spiel in the middle about "Were Europeans unable to grasp camel tech" was to poke fun at the eurocentric trope that Europeans were the only dynamic civilization in world history. Granted, there is overlap between eurocentrism and white racism, but not entirely. I intentionally made it about eurocentrism in particular because that's more what I'm interested in. I don't think my choices with the video are really to blame for the backlash happening in the comments. This "anger" we're seeing now only started a few days ago when a white supremacist tweeted about the video. Then it started making rounds on the alt-right grapevine. This isn't average white people being offended. This is identitarian cultists whistling at each other and shitposting for giggles.
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  73. This guy is on one what?
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  74. Thank you!
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  75. When I visited Scotland I had haggis every morning with breakfast and loved it. I was kind of surprised given its bad reputation. But then there are some traditional American dishes that I really don't like, like chitlins. People's tastes really have changed a lot in the past century or two. It used to be that everyone ate all parts of the animal. Now most people, at least in the West, stay away from a lot of things. I don't know if that's because of overabundance, or what foods freeze/can better, or what. Such a good point about old techniques being lost. How many recipes are disappearing because no one is carrying them on?
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  76. I've seen conflicting things regarding the cost of labor in precolonial Africa. Some scholars think labor was expensive, and others think it was cheap. About wheelbarrows as work multipliers -- I don't know about Africa, but in the Middle East up until maybe a century ago they didn't use wheelbarrows either. Instead they'd have two guys carry a load like a stretcher. How would that affect efficiency? I could be wrong, but I imagine that just means you need two guys to move something around the job site instead of one, without affecting the labor cost of the rest of the project. In precolonial Africa we're not talking about modern construction projects where time is money. These were villages with often large family and clan units that pooled their resources. Also, the population size generally didn't change much, so not a lot of demand for new construction. You build the houses, granary, etc. once and then use it for a hundred years.
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  77.  @antoniohernandez7171  That's a big topic, and different people learn differently. One method, which might or might not work for you, is to flag pages with things you want to remember, and then once you're finished with the book, go back and look at those pages and if the information still seems worth remembering, write it down in a notebook. Also, making a timeline on a piece of paper as you go through the book can help keep things straight.
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  78. I hadn't thought of it before but I'm open to the idea.
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  79. Almost everyone in the world who used or uses a technology borrowed it from somewhere else. Wheels were not independently invented in every village and farmstead. They were invented in one or two places and then diffused everywhere else. People in Western Europe didn't invent the wheel either. They borrowed it.
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  80. He was 72. At their first meeting Changchun had to explain that he did not actually know how to extend life. It must have been kind of awkward.
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  81. Thanks!
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  82. Thank you!
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  83. I love this so much
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  84. Yes, this preoccupation with the wheel is teleological. Wheels dominate transportation now, so supposedly they must have always been important. I wonder also if a lot of younger people nowadays, particularly those interested in history, have been influenced by the Civ games and similar that have tech trees. I don't think the problem of breeding horses in tsetse areas was ever solved. The Oyo were based in the savanna and they attacked into the Gap of Benin where the savanna reaches almost to the sea, around modern Togo and Benin.
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  85. ​ @orterves  Most creators don't have the option of being on Nebula.
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  86. On March 15 a white supremacist tweeted about the video. Several times, actually, over several days. Then tons of his followers came over here to brigade it.
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  87. I'm actually hoping to do a video just about Carl Sagan's use of history. Not soon though, unfortunately. Probably some time next year.
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  88. But that's okay, right? Persians do the same thing to the Greeks. They call Greece Yunan, which is not what the Greeks ever called it. Yunan comes from Ionia, which was the small Greek-settled area on the west coast of Asia Minor in ancient times. Or like how in Persian the word for Germany is Alman. The Germans don't call their country that. They say Deutschland. Alman comes from the Alemanni, a tribe that lived in what is now southwestern Germany. Or Finland (the same name in English and Persian). The Finns call their country Suomi. Or Armenia. Armenians call their country Hayestan, but Persians say Armanestan. Or Poland, China, Korea, Japan, India, Georgia. In all those cases, the Persian name for the country is different from the native name. Please don't feel that you must change all these Persian words. It is perfectly all right for the Persians to use names for these countries that the countries themselves don't use. Persian is its own language, and is allowed to have its own names for foreign countries.
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  89. That's a good idea for a topic. I'll add it to the list.
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  90. Thank you!
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  91. This is pretty much how I see it.
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  92.  @peterhoulihan9766  Africans weren't using stone weapons, either, so I'm not sure what your point is.
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  93. I wish I could, but I can't provide specific data to prove a negative. It's up to the people claiming the 40 million number to provide their evidence. The best I could do is to explain why it's problematic both to take the Chinese census numbers at face value and to attribute the difference in those numbers solely to Genghis Khan. As I said in the video, no specialists in Mongol history make this "40 million" claim. They all say we simply can't know how many people died in the Mongol wars of conquest, just as we can't know the fatality numbers in any premodern war.
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  94. It must have been amazing to participate in that Palenque roundtable. Imagine being in the room as your field completely transforms in real time.
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  95. Thanks for your comment. I would assume the Chinese used their wheelbarrows on their trails but I don't know for certain. I've been reading up on wheelbarrows for a possible future video but haven't come across the answer to that yet.
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  96. That sounds cool. Thanks for the tip!
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  97. I didn't say they were exclusive.
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  98. @Adam Shepherd You seem to be thinking about this from the standpoint of a construction tradesman. That would have been a rare occupation in sub-Saharan Africa before modern times. Remember, almost everyone was a subsistence farmer or gatherer. They didn't specialize in the building trades. It isn't a matter of a ruler forcing people to work inefficiently. It's a matter of subsistence farmers who occasionally, as a side project, put up a building. Laborers on building sites did exist in areas with higher population densities, i.e. areas with cities. Those areas were the Mediterranean region, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Areas of low population density, like Siberia, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, the far north of Europe, and most of the Americas, did not have regular construction projects because populations were extremely low and spread out, and what building they did do was occasional and ad hoc. What you said about the quality of the ground applies too. Wheelbarrows make sense when the land's been graded -- in the medieval world that would be cities (again, found only in certain regions) or in rural areas where wheeled traffic is already prevalent. An African farmer who decides to design a wheel-and-axle to ease his work will also have to invest the time and effort in grading the paths that his new ad-hoc wheelbarrow will travel on. Or he can take the path of least resistance and just pick the load up and carry it. It wasn't that Africans (or any of these other people, e.g. Siberians, Laplanders, Eskimos) rejected work multipliers. It's more that they could get by with what they had. They weren't full-time construction workers, so we shouldn't expect them to think like one. The way construction work is done now is a product of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the modern capitalist economy. Now we expect construction to be happening constantly, and if an area doesn't have a lot of new construction, we say it's dying. That mindset is part of modern industrial capitalism and doesn't apply to the preindustrial world. About the similarity with medieval Europe -- yes, in some ways the lifestyle of a medieval European farmer was very similar in broad strokes to that of a medieval African farmer. The standard of living was similar too. When the Portuguese visited the western coast of Africa in the 1400s, they described big, flourishing, rich kingdoms with big boats and powerful armies. But Europeans who visited those same areas in the late 1600s and 1700s described poor, ragtag kingdoms (which they were now calling "chiefdoms" and "tribes") with puny boats. Africa hadn't changed. Europe had. The Portuguese of the 1400s, as medieval Europeans, saw societies equivalent to their own. The Europeans of the 1700s lived in a much more complex and wealthy society, and therefore saw big gaps between their own lifestyles and the lifestyles of their African contemporaries.
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  99. That must have been the origin of the myth.
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  100. Turns out Dan Brown was as bad at physics as he was at history.
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  101. Thank you for taking the pictures, and for uploading them to Wikimedia Commons!
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  102. European merchants in the 17th and 18th centuries gave the Dahomean kings carriages as gifts. They only used them to parade around and show off.
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  103. That's a legitimate point of view. Another date that is often used is 610 or thereabouts, to mark the transition from "Eastern Roman" to "Byzantine" (a distinction that people at the time did not make, of course).
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  104. Yes. And Twitter, and PJ Media, and Gab, and Telegram. Racists shared it all over the place.
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  105. You were awesome in the video. Your channel looks really cool. Looking forward to watching more of the content on there.
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  106. Thanks! There will definitely be more videos about Iran.
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  107. Yes, a case could be made for this. It's fascinating how many possible dates there are.
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  108. It's ironic that an Iranian would object to the name "Persian" on the grounds that it comes from the province of Fars and therefore doesn't represent the whole country. Persian speakers do the exact same thing when they call Germany "Alman" (which comes from the Alemanni, who lived in Baden-Württemberg) or when they call Greece "Yunan" (which comes from Ionia, a region that isn't even part of modern Greece). I'm not saying that Persian speakers should change their names for those countries. I'm saying that when they make this objection, they're committing the etymological fallacy. While the word "Persia" originally derived from Parsa/Fars, that is not what the word means in English. "Persia" and "Fars" are two separate concepts in the English language. "Persia" always connotes the whole country of Iran, or the whole of a historical Persian empire (e.g. Achaemenids, Great Seljuks, Safavids, etc.). In English, you can never refer to the province of Fars as "Persia". The proper name for it is always "Fars".
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  109. Buster Keaton is amazing. I love all of his work.
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  110. Awesome find! Thanks for sharing! That gave me the idea of checking some other dictionaries on archive.org: A New Hindustani-English Dictionary (London, 1879), page 717: rumi, n.m. A Turk. Vocabulary of the English and Malay Languages (London, 1887), page 94: Rum (Ar.) Constantinople. Benua Rum--the Turkish Empire, or ancient Rome. Looks like we have a pretty stark difference between how the phrases "Roman" and "Roman empire" were defined in the West and in the Islamic world. That line in the Punjabi dictionary, "or as universally understood in India, a Turk" got me thinking. Maybe part of the stumbling block for a lot of the commenters on this video is that they don't realize that the Ottomans did not use the term "Turk" to describe themselves. For Europeans, "Turk" meant all Ottoman Muslims, and then later excluding the ones who spoke Arabic. But in the Ottoman empire, "Turk" meant a rural pastoralist.
    15
  111. Thanks!
    15
  112. Descriptors is a good way to put it. In a way, they're all just there to clarify which "Muhammad" or "Yusuf" we're talking about (or whatever the person's ism is).
    15
  113. As I said in the video, camels carry more. Their cruising speed is comparable to a donkey's, iirc. The people of the Middle East used carts and wagons pulled by donkeys and mules, and then they transitioned away from that to using camels as pack animals. I said that in the video.
    15
  114. Yes, that's a cool parallel.
    15
  115.  TCF  Yes, I think you're right. All he wanted to do was putter around on his farm.
    14
  116. Thanks! 1. Why should they? Technology does not inevitably lead to colonization. See the Treasure Fleets of Zheng He. 2. There is a lot of debate over this question. Some historians think there were conditions specific to Europe that made industrialization inevitable there and impossible elsewhere (but they disagree about what those conditions were). Other historians think that China (and perhaps to a lesser extent Japan and India - though the latter is a very controversial claim) was on the brink of industrialization, too, and if it had been delayed in Britain then it would have happened in China first. Either way, the Industrial Revolution was an extremely dramatic change. Europe was completely transformed by it, so it would be anachronistic to project back and say, "well, Europe was a certain way after industrialization, so it must have been like that before."
    14
  117. Yes.
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  118. Thanks, I suspected that might be the case. Good to get some corroboration.
    14
  119. Teşekkür ederim! Interesting that there's a phrase "Muslim Rome".
    14
  120. The Ship of Theseus is an excellent analogy for the Roman empire. I might steal that.
    14
  121. Can you imagine electors being directly elected today? That would be wild.
    14
  122. Coincidentally, I'm finishing up a video right now that makes this point about the Ottomans.
    13
  123. Did you watch the video? I didn't say that Africans used waterways (although they in fact did). Africa does have inland navigable waterways. You might be thinking of the fact that African rivers hit falls and rapids shortly before reaching the sea, making them useless for sailing INTO Africa from the ocean. But there were trade routes along rivers within Africa. When away from rivers, Africans used pack animals or, in tsetse areas, human porterage. I don't believe that "all human civilization must be equal" and I said no such thing in the video. My not-so-silent premise was that all humans are capable of creating and using technology. There is abundant empirical evidence that Africans did. The "real answer" you so coyly refer to is not a real answer, because it can easily be turned around against Europeans. (You would know that if you watched the video.) There are many technologies that were in use in Asia for centuries before they were introduced into Europe. The abacus was used in Mesopotamia 2,000 years before it was used in Europe. The Chinese were using magnetic compasses 1,000 years before Europeans were. Paper and printing were in use centuries before, and literacy rates in China and Japan in the late Middle Ages were higher than in Europe. The Iron Age began in the Near East in 1200 BC, but it took 300 years after that for Italians to start working with it and 700 years for Scandinavians. What took them so long? Were they stupid? I don't think Europeans were stupid. But by your logic, you have no choice but to conclude that they were.
    13
  124. If you do a video on the topic I will happily promote it! I've already gotten one comment on this video asking me to do a followup for the Americas. I'd rather you do it and I'll direct them to you.
    12
  125. The drop in violent crime (at least in the U.S.) is correlated with a dramatic increase in incarceration. I would argue that our current prison system is another form of violence. It seems to me that we haven't reduced violence in the U.S., we've transferred it and concentrated it, out of view of mainstream society.
    12
  126. Thanks! It's good to know that there are people out there who appreciate my approach. I'll be sure to find other ways to get silent film footage into my B-roll.
    12
  127. Fascinating video. Looks like there's way more to khipu than what world history textbooks let on. Seems quite reasonable that they could have combined multiple encoding methods. After all, that's what the Japanese and Akkadian/Hittite writing systems do. Also, I love the synergy of you and Veritasium both releasing videos about knots in the same weekend.
    12
  128. I used to be.
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  129. Thank you so much!
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  130. Thank you. Bear in mind that this video was aimed at English speakers. Many English speakers believe one must say "Farsi," but English speakers do not know that Iranians also say "Parsi." They think one must say "Farsi" with an F to be respectful and culturally sensitive to Iranian people. You can see that this is wrong, which is why I made the video.
    12
  131. Yes, they were. They had all the same elements. Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatima_al-Fihriya They used umm (mother) instead of abu and bint (daughter) instead of ibn. Biographical dictionaries also included them, but in smaller numbers than men.
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  132. Yes. Most Westerners are unaware that the "Greek" and "Turkish" identities at the end of the Ottoman empire were based solely on religion, and were not based on genetic background. It's all a matter of arbitrary labels.
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  133. There were two-story buildings. I don't know much about the history of writing in Africa. I'm still a beginner in African history. Good idea for a video topic though.
    11
  134. The North Africans used carts for a while, and then they stopped using them in favor of camels as pack animals. Wheeled transport disappeared from North Africa in Late Antiquity. (I mentioned this in the video.) "Subsistence level" is what almost everyone was at before modern times. 90% or 95% of people even in Europe and China were subsistence farmers in the Middle Ages. That said, there were cities and state societies in medieval Africa. Everyone in the world was "running on low technology levels" in the Middle Ages. They didn't adopt the wheel readily when colonized. Europeans had a hard time introducing wheeled transport to tsetse areas. There are accounts of Europeans bringing oxen and wagons to what is now Tanzania, and they say all the oxen died within a couple days of trying to go into the interior. Colonial administrators tried to use carts in West Africa and gave up and just used porterage until the railroads were constructed. Where did they get that car? That footage is from a cross-Africa road trip some Frenchmen did in the 1930s. They drove from France to South Africa.
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  135. Thanks, I appreciate it!
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  136. "upper middle class" lol I wish
    11
  137. It's imaginable, but it's also a lot. We can't say it happened unless we have evidence for it. But I haven't seen anyone cite any good evidence. Just vibes.
    11
  138. Thanks!
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  139. Thanks!
    10
  140.  @lucafaithfull7397  The Ottomans didn't have to model their mosques on the Hagia Sophia. The fact that they did is an example of cultural borrowing. Mimar Sinan, the Ottoman architect that he mentions in the video, came from a Christian family. The point he was making was not about the Hagia Sophia itself, but about the other mosques based on it, like the Suleimaniyye.
    10
  141. From the British point of view, yes.
    10
  142. A white supremacist made several tweets about it. That brought in a bunch of his followers, and they also shared it around on different alt-right sites.
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  143. Thanks!
    9
  144. So true.
    9
  145. I'm pretty sure the Mongols used wagons pulled by oxen to haul their yurts.
    9
  146. What  @ischray4089  said. We shouldn't dunk on Europe for not using the camel and we shouldn't dunk on sub-Saharan Africa for not using the wheel.
    9
  147. It was a culturally Greek project. It was Greek learning that was stored and studied there.
    9
  148. Yes, I read the same thing when I was researching the video. The "Indiana" is labelling specifically the star.
    9
  149. Ben teşekkür ederim!
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  150. There are a lot of dislikes but not that many. But anyway, yeah, it's racists. It all started when a white supremacist tweeted about the video a week ago. That's when they started swarming.
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  151. Yes, very, very low population density. When people farmed, they changed fields from year to year. It wouldn't have been worth it to grade tracks that wheeled vehicles could travel on.
    9
  152. No, not mistakes. Just different words. (By the way, the Japanese say Nihon and the Koreans say Hanguk.)
    8
  153. Thanks for commenting! Just to clarify, Diocletian moved the capital to Milan in 286, and then the capital was moved again to Ravenna in 408. When Rome "fell" in 476, it actually fell in Ravenna. I maybe should have mentioned that in the video.
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  154. Medieval Mongols HATE this one simple trick!
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  155. That's a big topic with several theories. I plan to do an in-depth video at some point, hopefully next year.
    8
  156. Thank you!
    8
  157. Thanks!
    8
  158. I maybe need to come up with a different title.
    8
  159. Most of that knowledge was dispersed throughout the Islamic world, and some of it by then had also seeped into Europe. By "science" though, we're talking mainly about commentaries on Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and other ancient Greeks. There could have been some obscure authors who weren't popular and therefore their books weren't copied much, where the last surviving copies were destroyed in Baghdad. That's possible.
    8
  160. Racists are obsessed with this video
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  161. Thank you!
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  162. When I said that precolonial Africans didn't build structures with a "time is money" attitude, I meant that modern construction projects are financial investments where workers are on a clock and owners are thinking about shareholders and interest rates and such. In that scenario there is a disincentive to doing work at less than optimal efficiency. Those considerations didn't exist for preindustrial farmers in any region of the world.
    8
  163. You just described the ancient Romans.
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  164. I like your comment, but I feel weird hitting the like button because I don't think Thanos was right. 😀 Seems like the population would have grown again in a few generations. I don't think Thanos thought it through.
    8
  165. Rope teethe bromate I can say random words, too.
    8
  166. @Czexan What inconsistency?
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  167. It was too far away to take advantage of the resources or to defend.
    8
  168. Thanks!
    8
  169. He meant that the Ottomans adopted a Christian style of architecture.
    8
  170. This comment is confusing. Nothing in the video is emotional or politicizing. I didn't lecture people about the merits of African civilizations. What a weird take.
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  171. It should not be surprising that Dahl was racist and anti-semitic. On the contrary, it would be surprising to come across a white author of his generation (or of the previous 8 or 10 generations at a minimum) who WASN'T racist and anti-semitic. Those views were nearly universal and unquestioned among whites until relatively recently. Even if they didn't express such prejudices in writing, you can be confident that virtually every white author of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries shared those views, or at least took them for granted and didn't examine them. Exceptions would be rare enough to be notable. By the way, NAACP is pronounced "N double-A C P".
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  172. 18:15 Maya names are so gnarly.
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  173. You're right that it isn't a simple relationship. It's more like a feedback loop. Improved agricultural productivity reduced demand for farm labor, so rural people migrated to cities and worked in factories (and other industrial concerns like mines and railroads). Their labor expanded industrial production, allowing for more and better farm machinery and transportation systems, further reducing demand for farm labor and driving more rural people to the cities to work in factories. I could be mistaken, but I don't think hygiene was a major factor in population growth until the end of the 19th century. That's when they started putting sewer systems in the big cities. That's also when electrical refrigeration became available. Most vaccines were developed in the 20th century. And you're right that those things contributed to population growth, in a big way. Population growth was much faster in the 20th century than in the 19th century. The drop in birth rates is due to social and economic factors independent of the food supply.
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  174. Yes, that's right.
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  175. "Civilizations" aren't real. People are real. No, industrialization didn't just happen, but neither did "Western Civilization" do it.
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  176. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages people very rarely traveled in wheeled vehicles. Wheeled vehicles were for carrying goods. It was not unusual for people to travel long distances, but when they did it was either by walking (most people) or by riding an animal (if they could afford one), or they traveled by boat.
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  177. Welcome to my world
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  178. Thank you! Yes, it's fascinating how much Arab culture influenced Iberia. The Spanish and Portuguese naming systems are also interesting, and largely unfamiliar to anglophones.
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  179. Can you explain? How does that destroy the argument?
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  180.  @TheAkashicTraveller  That's an advantage over, say, YouTube memberships. The tricky part though is getting your existing Patreon patrons to switch to a different payment platform if you decide Patreon isn't worth it.
    7
  181. The treaty says it's in perpetuity.
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  182.  @Charlie-Em  Thanks, that means a lot!
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  183. It would be amazing if we found a stash of long lost works in the desert somewhere.
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  184. Are you saying an ox pulling a wagon can go ten times faster than a camel?
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  185. I don't think "Byzantine" is an insult. I do get what you mean about the differences between periods. But why a different term altogether, and why draw the period boundary between Roman and Byzantine where we do? There are reasons for those decisions, and I simply don't agree with those reasons. Does the Heraclian period really have more in common with the Palaiologan period than with the Constantinian?
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  186. That was experimented with in Late Antiquity but didn't catch on. I don't know why. Maybe it was less efficient? I think Richard Bulliet talked about this in his book The Camel and the Wheel but I skimmed over that part.
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  187. Thanks! I'm glad you like it.
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  188. Hi, thanks for your comment! It's misleading that the Wikipedia editor put three sources because they aren't three independent, corroborating sources. The first one (Reference 38, Ho 1970) doesn't make any claims about Mongol-caused fatalities. As its title suggests, it just gives population figures for China before the Mongols. But it is cited in the second source (Reference 39, McEvedy 1978). And the third source (Reference 40, Coleman 2005, cited in Wikipedia as Graziella Caselli, etc.) cites McEvedy 1978. So it's one source: McEvedy 1978. McEvedy 1978 is the book I was referring to in the video when I said, "There's a book from the '70s that claims that North China's population dropped 75% due to death and displacement." He also claims that the Mongols massacred 35 million people in China. McEvedy is as far back as I've been able to trace this idea so far. He's basing this on reported census figures in China. That by itself is not enough evidence to say confidently that the Mongols killed that many people. Moreover, his discussion of the Mongol wars and their motivations is quite inaccurate. He was not a trained historian, definitely not a Mongol specialist, and apparently relied on pop culture for his information about the Mongol empire. Also, the sentence these references are attached to reads, "it is possible that between 20 and 57 million people were killed between 1206 and 1405 during the various campaigns of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, and Timur." I might have missed it, but I don't believe any of the sources directly say this. Maybe the Wikipedia editor collated figures from different parts of one or more of the sources. (And if so, does that count as original research per Wikipedia rules?)
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  189. Fascinating video. Years ago I had some presumably Mesoamerica-style spicy chocolate drink mix. It was really good. Those two flavors go great together.
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  190. I thought this. But a few weeks ago I saw a video of a research talk at a vexillological conference where the guy presented a lot of information to argue that it's a historical myth. Apparently the Calvert and Crossland colors were not used as separate flags by different factions in Maryland, and other things. I just tried looking for the talk again but I couldn't find it.
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  191. That thumbnail is amazing
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  192. Wow, imagine U.S. history where government by assassination was a thing. That would have been crazy.
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  193. Also, there was cultural dialogue between Greeks and Turks. Many Greeks cooperated with the new Ottoman regime, including the Orthodox Church.
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  194. I really like this "on the road" format. I hope you do a lot more of them.
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  195. With only two political parties the U.S. system can seem like it lacks choice. But I guess Italy shows you can have too much of a good thing.
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  196. That's right. Earth is actually a really good building material. It keeps the interior cool during the day and warm at night. European peasants also built their homes with mud and clay and enjoyed similar benefits.
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  197. I haven't heard of him, but thanks for the tip. I'll have to check out his stuff.
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  198. There is a band of territory in West Africa between the Sahara and the tsetse zone. Horses, donkeys, and cattle were present there.
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  199. Thank you for your kind words. I knew I was getting into controversial territory toward the end. As you may imagine, many Iranians who live in the West feel the way you do about the previous regime.
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  200. Thank you for the kind words! I got a PhD in medieval Islamic history, but obviously my history interests extend beyond that.
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  201. Our Taoists were from Shandong, so wouldn't they have spoken a dialect of Old Mandarin?
    7
  202. If you're interested, the official stats as of right now from the YouTube backend: 5,507 likes, 1,303 dislikes, 80.9%
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  203. The nineteenth century isn't ancient.
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  204. Honestly, I will hear you out if you try to explain. I will do my best to consider what you say fairly and discuss with you in good faith.
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  205. They also ate lots of dairy and oats.
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  206. I'm curious why you believe this. Africa definitely had metallurgy and other cultural production before the Europeans arrived. Go read about precolonial Africa. It's really interesting.
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  207. Thank you!
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  208. You mean before colonization, right? I don't know the answer. It might be a social or cultural thing. It could have to do with the class structure that existed there. I don't know enough about the Lakes area to say.
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  209. Thanks!
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  210. The Constitution or the 1789 election?
    6
  211. You know what's crazy? Last week the video was dead at 22K views. The algorithm wasn't promoting it. Then these guys started sharing it around and now the algorithm is boosting it.
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  212. Thanks! I do hope to do more Africa content. Probably not till the middle of next year, though, because of other videos I have coming up.
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  213. I'm glad the video helped a little. I do plan to do more Iran videos so stay tuned. Iran's Islamic heritage is a touchy subject for Iranians nowadays because of the current political situation there.
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  214. Yeah, at the moment I said that in the video I literally thought about Steven Pinker. There are huge cultural blinders when it comes to national heroes. Somehow creating a nation or leading it to "greatness" (however that's defined) gives certain historical figures a pass to do all sorts of things.
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  215. There were indeed countries in Africa with governments.
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  216. It's true that the European economy (including North Africa) in the Middle Ages was larger than the sub-Saharan African economy. But what do you mean by Europeans being "able to create an economy" of that size? Do you mean that Africans were constrained by their environment, or do you mean the Europeans had greater intellectual capacity?
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  217. Asia had a larger and more vibrant economy than Europe in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. So I guess Asians are superior to Europeans?
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  218.  @smirking8457  I don't believe everyone is the same. Of course there are genetic differences among population groups. But this claim that black Africans have such a low level of intelligence that they can't operate simple machinery -- that's an astounding claim. Not for moral reasons. Please don't kneejerk assume I'm an SJW, because I'm not. It's just that there is so much evidence from archaeology and history, and from my personal experience knowing black people, that they can in fact operate machinery. How do you explain, for example, that medieval Africans had iron bloomeries? If their level of cognition was too low to operate a wheel and axle, wouldn't it also have been too low to operate a bloomery? This is not a gotcha. I'm really asking. I couldn't be the first white person to ask this. You guys must read books or websites that explain this, right? What's the explanation?
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  219. I just thought the two words (have and use) were synonymous in this case. There was a 50/50 chance I would have gone one way or the other when I wrote the title. I was under the impression they neither had them nor used them. Is that not true? I know they were in contact with cultures that used wheels, but I didn't think that'd count.
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  220. Thanks! I'm fascinated by complex systems of government, so I'll have to learn about Belgium's.
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  221. Yeah, my channel's been kind of under the radar. Thanks for helping!
    6
  222. or Stardew Valley
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  223. I don't think you know what the word "seethe" means.
    6
  224. I'm glad there's interest! It'll have to be a while. I have some other video projects coming along, and I'll have to spend some more time on research before I'm comfortable giving Russia's side. I'd guess next fall, unfortunately.
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  225. Thank you for watching!
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  226. That's an excellent idea of making some videos while you're in England. I'd love to see history videos that go on location. It seems like not too many of them do that. It'd make it easier to visualize things. Most people use stock footage, which is fine since it's all most people can do, but getting firsthand footage would be really nice. The Industrial Revolution is really underrated in terms of how much attention it gets. It made a bigger impact on us than any war did. People like to speculate about alternate endings of World War II or the American Civil War, but there isn't as much speculation about what the world would be like if the Industrial Revolution had started somewhere else instead of Britain. Good idea about me doing a video about industrialization. I'll think about how I could approach it. I've been trying to learn Blender in my spare time so I can incorporate short animations in my videos -- just simple stuff like animating diagrams. Industrialization is definitely the kind of topic that that sort of thing would lend itself to.
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  227. Thank you very much!
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  228. Thanks! The Dune example is interesting since I've heard that Herbert was partially inspired by T. E. Lawrence. I have yet to delve into Tolkien's world (I've only read The Hobbit and part of Fellowship). I wonder if he got inspiration from Welsh naming patterns, which has a version of the nasab along with sometimes nicknames that would correspond to the nisba or laqab.
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  229. Thanks!
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  230. Agreed. They'd be great for off-roading.
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  231. Eratosthenes' works don't survive today, but they were around in Strabo's time and he read them. According to Strabo, Eratosthenes discussed a lot of earlier writers.
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  232.  @madaranotsoanonymousnowuch1539  The Mongol campaigns were not typical. They were highly unusual. Only a tiny minority of people in the 13th century died in city sackings. I'm not diminishing their suffering. I'm saying let's keep it in perspective. The Mongol conquests get our attention and dominate depictions of the 13th century because they're lurid, but they weren't normal.
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  233. Yeah, when I recorded that back in October, the channel only had 46 subscribers. I thought it was going to take a long time for Turks to discover the video and comment. Keep fighting the good fight! People who haven't studied history don't know how deep and complex it gets.
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  234. Thanks!
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  235. Not that kind of rice. They had rice that produced less food per year.
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  236. Thanks again! I would just add that it's nice to see a non-American take an interest in the intricacies of U.S. election history. (And anyone else reading this -- do check out the Alabama video linked above. It's very interesting.)
    5
  237. What critiques? All I see are straw man arguments and people saying "cope" over and over.
    5
  238. I admire your optimism. But as the saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a position he didn't reason himself into. Racists believe in their racism for emotional reasons. They react emotionally when confronted with any facts or logic that challenges their worldview.
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  239. All of those things existed in precolonial Africa.
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  240. I don't find the cold winter theory persuasive because the earliest civilizations (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus Valley) were in hot climates with no cold winter. If cold winter theory were true, then wouldn't the earliest cities and civilizations have been in cold climates?
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  241. Wow, you watched all my videos?
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  242. Either way. English dictionaries give both pronunciations. Historians of the Mongol empire all say it with a J or CH sound. In Mongolian it's Chinggis.
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  243. There were iron working, cities, and empires. Those things aren't paleolithic.
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  244. That's really interesting. I recently started learning Portuguese (at a slow and casual pace). Cool to learn a new word. I love seeing the Arabic loanwords in Spanish and Portuguese.
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  245. I'm not ashamed of it. I didn't say anything in the video that made Europeans look stupid.
    5
  246. Thanks! But "God from God, Light from Light" is in the original wording from 325. I just double checked Socrates and Athanasius. It's also reproduced in the article "Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed" on OrthodoxWiki.
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  247. Thanks for the tip! That channel's a real hidden gem. I'm surprised it has so few views.
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  248. Global warming came early to Virginia.
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  249. Yes, all their names are preserved. None of the top-tier Founders (in terms of name recognition), but there were some. Telfair from Georgia, C. C. Pinckney and Edward Rutledge from S.C., Bedford from Delaware, Huntington and Wolcott from Connecticut. Those aren't all, but it's guys like that.
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  250. What is HBD?
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  251. When the Iranians of the 20th century were creating constitutions, they were taking the idea from contemporary Europe rather than from ancient India.
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  252. That is a fascinating period, I have to admit.
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  253. There was a lot of anti-annexation sentiment too. A fair portion of the population up there was descended from Loyalists during the American Revolution. I do hope to do some content on Canadian Confederation someday.
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  254. This 100%
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  255.  @JasmineTeaEnjoyer  Not just talking about East Asians. All of Asia had larger economies and more craftsmen making finer objects than Europeans could. Indians, Persians, Arabs, etc. Also, I think you misspoke. East Asians wouldn't be honorary whites. Remember, the ASIANS are superior. The whites are inferior, remember? The ASIANS had the larger economy and are therefore superior. So if anything, it would be the whites being honorary Asians.
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  256.  @calebbarnhouse496  I honestly didn't try to create a straw man and I don't know what road I didn't go down. I genuinely want to understand what you guys are saying.
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  257. I only started exploring comics a year ago, and one thing that's struck me is how much of a mythological vibe a lot of it has. Gilgamesh is another Jack Kirby creation. That guy was amazing. Such fascinating world-building.
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  258. Thank you very much!
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  259. Alexandria is such a cool city. I hope you got some seafood while you were there.
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  260. Both of the things you mention. Educated men always had a sense of being part of a larger Persian culture. And then Iranianness in the modern sense (popular loyalty to the "nation" of Iranians rather than to dynasty and/or other group identity) happened in the late 1800s and early 1900s -- it varied depending on whether people were urban or rural and to what extent they were exposed to Western ideas.
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  261. Thanks! And thank you for subscribing for so long
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  262. After 177,500 views and 1,400 comments, someone finally noticed
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  263. Fascinating point about the Byzantine historians. Which historians were they? I'd love to follow up on that. I had a section in my video where I said that some Byzantines accepted and legitimized the Ottoman sultans as Roman emperors, but I took it out in editing because it was based on memory of things read a long time ago and I wasn't sure I could support it with sources if challenged.
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  264. Thanks, I thought this might be the case but I wasn't sure. It's good to get some corroboration.
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  265.  @Sthrl188  Yes, still in the 1800s.
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  266. Yes, Egyptians were enormously important in early Christian history.
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  267. Thank you! That really means a lot
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  268. I've wondered that too.
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  269. ¡Muchas gracias! Y en nombre de todo el mundo, gracias por los cultivos.
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  270. That's right. None of their records survive. That's the case with all ancient Persian dynasties. Most of what we know is what is written by outsiders. It so happens the Romans didn't say much about the Parthians.
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  271. 27:11 I was hoping you'd address Raiders of the Lost Ark. Very interesting to hear what parts of it had a basis in history.
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  272. I know what you mean. There's a language in India called Kannada, and the name is weird to me because I think, "Wait, the name 'Canada' is already taken."
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  273.  @monarchofthesea9395  I thought the emperors of Trebizond claimed to be the legitimate rulers of Constantinople, but I just looked it up and apparently Emperor John II renounced the claim to Constantinople in 1282. I wonder if they still called themselves Romans though. If so, then 1461 would still count, I think. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the Ottoman claim. They occupied the same territory that the Eastern Roman Empire did, with the same capital. They were recognized as the legitimate Roman emperors by the Patriarchs of Constantinople. Sure, they seized control through military conquest, but then so did a lot of previous Byzantine emperors. Many new Byzantine dynasties were started by a general seizing Constantinople (sometimes through a violent sack, e.g. the Komnenids) and taking the throne by force. Maybe the chief argument against the Ottoman claim is that they were Muslim instead of Christian. But that's a matter of one's personal definition of Roman-ness. Is Christianity an intrinsic part of Roman identity? Medieval Byzantines would have said yes, but I can imagine other Romans in other periods not necessarily agreeing. If the Ottomans had been Christian, I strongly suspect modern historians would see them as one more in a long line of Byzantine dynasties. As for the Russian claim, I know less about it, but as far as I know that was more a notion of spiritual successor. One defines the Roman empire as the bastion of the Christian faith. With the fall of Constantinople, Moscow is now the bastion of the Faith, ergo Moscow is the third Rome. I could be getting that wrong though. I'll need to do more research.
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  274. Funny you should say that. I've read that Mongolian culture has some similarities with American culture -- rugged individualism, Marlboro Man type stuff.
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  275. Thanks! As a starting point, I'd look at this article on Wikipedia. It includes charts that summarize the various estimates, broken down by region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population I'd also recommend learning about the demographic transition. That's basically the mechanism by which we quintupled our population in a century (stage 2 especially -- lowering death rates and high birth rates). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition The site Our World in Data has lots of really awesome graphs and visualizations: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth I used their graphs in my video. Their historical estimates are actually a little higher than some others. If you look closely in the section of my video with all the graphs, the numbers I say don't always match with the numbers on the graph. That's why. I like these two publications for an overview of historical demography: 1. United Nations, The Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends, 1973 https://archive.org/details/UN1973TheDeterminantsAndConsequencesOfPopulationTrends 2. John D. Durand, Historical Estimates of World Population: An Evaluation, 1974 https://repository.upenn.edu/psc_penn_papers/9/ For the link between food supply and human population level: Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel, "Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply," Environment, Development and Sustainability, Vol. 3, no. 1 (2001), pages 1-15 http://www.bioinfo.rpi.edu/bystrc/pub/pimentel.pdf
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  276. Both pronunciations are okay.
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  277. Well, in the video all I did was make assertions, so I can't blame you for not taking my word for it. I didn't really get into why I think this about technology. I might need to make a video in which I explain my reasoning on this.
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  278. I'm not being anti-racist. I'm following where the evidence leads. The hypothesis that Africans had low intelligence creates more logical problems than the hypothesis that they had particular environmental challenges.
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  279. He must sprinkle some spices on first. I heard that helps.
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  280. The only time the similarity between the Romanian and Chadian flags is a problem is when you're crossing the Romania/Chad border. Otherwise I just don't see why it matters.
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  281. Yes, I think you're right.
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  282.  @Jim777425  You say Osman declared jihad against the Romans. That's called the Ghazi Thesis, an old idea in Ottoman studies that Ottoman specialists today generally don't adhere to. The common view among specialists now (as far as I know) is that Osman was not motivated by religious zeal to spread Islam, and that he had Greek Christians as well as Turks among his followers. More generally, there was not a strict distinction between the two sides, where all the Byzantine forces were Greek-speaking Christians and all the Ottoman forces were Turkish-speaking Muslims. There was a mix on both sides. Late Byzantine history includes lots of Turks participating in the Byzantine military (turcopoles) and of Ottomans fighting as allies alongside one side or the other of Byzantine civil wars. Regarding ethnicity, countries in Antiquity and the Middle Ages didn't define their country according to ethnicity. That's generally a modern practice, less than 250 years old. For the Byzantines, what made you Roman was your culture and religion. Anyone from any (what we would call) ethnicity could be Roman provided they acted like a Roman and believed like a Roman. If the Ottomans had adopted Orthodox Christianity, then the Romans (Greeks) would have shrugged and acknowledged them as the next Roman dynasty. As a matter of fact, many of them did shrug and accept them, but that was often accompanied by conversion. The population of Turkey today is genetically largely the same as it was 600 years ago (albeit with some Turkic admixture). We only call them Turks because their ancestors converted to Islam rather than remain Christian.
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  283. Islam was introduced into the Sahel by Arab and Berber merchants. That boundary only emerged in the 19th century. Until then Islam had been present only in cities and among the elites in the interior of West Africa. Then in the 19th century it spread among the general population, at the same time that Christianity was spreading up from the Atlantic coast.
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  284. I didn't say anything "liberal".
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  285. I love this video so much
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  286. An old fashioned for me, or an Aperol neat.
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  287. What do you mean by "never developed"?
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  288. It's sad that French is disappearing in South Louisiana.
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  289. I want to thank you for your rant about ancient civilizations (Question 3). I 100% feel the same way.
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  290. I was tied to the screen the whole time. I could knot khipu from watching
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  291. Thanks! About the pronunciation-- When I was growing up, dictionaries either only gave /sizm/ as the pronunciation, or put both /sizm/ and /skizm/ but would mark /skizm/ as nonstandard. I followed the dictionaries' lead. More recent dictionaries just list both pronunciations without saying that one is preferred or more standard. I suspect that's because so many people mispronounced it /skizm/ that that has now become an alternate standard pronunciation.
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  292. Centuries in the future people will say that all your books were suddenly destroyed in one great disaster when an evil villain demolished your backpack.
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  293. Yes, that's true. Western Afghanistan was very commonly part of different Persian empires. Historically the term "Persia" included western Afghanistan and extended up into Central Asia a bit. That's why so many people in Afghanistan speak Persian today. The international border located between Herat and Mashhad is a modern creation. The British wanted to make sure Afghanistan was pro-British in the Anglo-Russian rivalry, They didn't want a situation where Russians could station troops there and threaten India. The British didn't directly take over Afghanistan, but they signed treaties where Afghanistan allowed Britain to handle their foreign affairs and the British had to have a presence in the country. They were officially independent though. For the British, they were basically a buffer state against Russian expansion.
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  294. That evolved slowly and went through several stages. The current practice of only having the candidates' names on the ballot and not the electors dates from the early 20th century. Technically an elector can vote for someone other than the candidate s/he is pledged to. It isn't common because electors are now (and have been for a long time) party loyalists. It does happen every once in a while. They're called faithless electors. Many states have laws requiring electors to vote for the candidate they're pledged to, but the punishment is minor (typically a small fine). Also sometimes a faithless elector is disqualified and replaced with someone else at the last minute. Depends on the state. There was an unusually high number of faithless electors in the 2016 election, relatively speaking.
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  295. The treaty doesn't mention a lease or term limit: "His Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias, agrees to cede to the United States, by this convention, immediately upon the exchange of the ratifications thereof, all the territory and dominion now possessed by his said Majesty on the continent of America and in adjacent islands ..."
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  296. No, not exactly. They tried using ox-pulled wagons in East Africa. The oxen all died. It wasn't until the Europeans built railroads in the early 20th century that wheeled transport became significant.
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  297. That's a good idea.
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  298. Thank you!
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  299. Thank you!
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  300. In the early days of the Mongol conquests, the Mongols were completely baffled by what purpose farmers could possibly serve. Eventually though they did figure out that they could tax them.
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  301. I'm basing this on what Richard Bulliet explained in The Wheel and the Camel. I recommend checking out that book to learn more.
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  302. Thanks!
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  303. Just saw the video (because I only just saw the comment). Good video!
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  304. I know what you mean - those middle names.
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  305.  @KinoTechUSA69  You mean like all that megalithic architecture the Teutonic peoples built?
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  306. I would LOVE to watch a series where Uncle Roger gets a time machine and meets different historical figures.
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  307.  @smirking8457  Okay, thanks. That's really helpful. I've gotten comments saying simply that Africans had low IQ so I thought it was understood as a simple sliding scale, but this is more nuanced. I don't know the first thing about this persective on race. Who are the prominent authors that everyone reads? Are there different schools of thought? Are there, for example, different perspectives on how traits compare between Europeans and East Asians, or is there a consensus? Where would someone go for more information?
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  308. @matroV "Cultural Marxism. Teaching of the Frankfurt School." LOL
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  309. It wasn't a mistake. It's really unlikely Russia could have maintained control of it.
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  310. Northern U.S., so not that far off. I'll have to check out Dungeon Musings.
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  311. You're right, I do sound like him.
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  312. I honestly want to understand -- if their IQ is that low, how did they build cities and work with iron before the Europeans arrived?
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  313. Thank you!
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  314. Apparently they're more ornery and aggressive than horses. I don't know. But here are a couple links: https://lettersandscience.ucdavis.edu/news/does-hunting-explain-why-zebras-are-not-domesticated https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/natural-sciences/animals/mammals/why-zebras-were-never-domesticated/
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  315. Thank you!
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  316. Sort of. It isn't really a word. Academic historians will describe themselves with this sort of term. Someone who studies medieval Europe is a medievalist. Someone who specializes in American history is an Americanist. (These terms don't mean anything to people outside of academia, though.) In that sense, I study all of premodern history, which is not really a specialization. It's sort of a way for me to say I'm a generalist. But also it reflects my predisposition to take older ways of thought seriously, rather than think that anything new and modern is automatically better.
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  317. Could be. Salt was available in Europe though. I don't think they were importing that from Asia.
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  318. Thanks!
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  319. Yeah, it was really cheap. Even people at the time thought so. It was valuable to Americans but not so much to the Russian tsar.
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  320. Yes, you're right. Each took over about half of the old Roman Empire, and they're both heirs of Greco-Roman culture.
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  321. Sub-Saharan Africans worked with iron and bronze. And white people are black people with white skin. The first Europeans were black, and then a skin mutation 10,000 years ago resulted in what we call white skin.
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  322. All good points. I don't think I'd want to explain Arabic morphology in this video. It was already pretty technical as it was. Hans Wehr doesn't list a verb for the Form II, and my eye skipped over the line on the next page. But you're right, ghazzal is in Hans Wehr. I learned what ghazzali means when I looked up al-Ghazzali in Ibn Khallikan, where he explains it. He specifically said it's a Khwarezmian thing, I don't know why. Thanks for the etymology. So I guess the Egyptian pronunciation is the most conservative? Interesting.
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  323.  @alangivre2474  This is a good way to put it. India was the link between the two waves.
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  324. I was wondering when someone would being him up! I was thinking he killed him because he presented political opposition to Temujin.
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  325. I've never read an actual explanation of this, but judging from what I've seen I'd say they generally picked the most distinctive part of the name, i.e. the part least likely to also be used by someone else. I think it arose from what friends and acquaintances did when the person was alive. It'd be most efficient to use the part of the name that was most unique when talking about someone. That's my guess anyway.
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  326. I wonder if part of this is due to Western cultural expectations that have been exported to the rest of the world. The stereotypical images of the mosque we see at the beginning of the video derive from Western movies and cartoons from the early and mid 20th century, which come from Ottoman styles. Europeans were far more aware of the Ottoman world than the rest of the Muslim world due to 19th-century European tourism. You note the power of the Ottomans, but the Mughals were arguably a more powerful empire. But the Mughals did not have as much impact on the European imagination. I'm glad to hear someone noting the continuity between the Byzantines and Ottomans. That is definitely underappreciated in modern perceptions of the Middle Ages.
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  327.  @philjan23  Yes, I have read this, that the colonization of the Americas made it possible to eventually industrialize. I haven't studied the scholarly literature in detail on this question so I don't have an opinion on it, but I believe it's a reasonable possibility.
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  328. Thank you, and good luck with your new job! I agree, if academics can get into this mindset it would work wonders.
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  329. Thank you!
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  330. I've never read it.
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  331.  @joerogue231  This is a great list. Very interesting putting the Achaemenids first. My instinct would have been to put the Mongols first, but after seeing your list I'm not sure. In the period of the Achaemenids, the next biggest countries were (I'm guessing) some of the Warring States in China (Chu? Yue?), Magadha in India and the Carthaginians in the Mediterranean. A case could possibly be made for the Persians being far beyond them in power. A case could also be made for ranking Alexander's empire first or second. The trouble with ancient dynasties is we usually have so little economic and military data to go on. Where would you put the Umayyads and Abbasids? I'd probably put them near the top, around 4th or 5th place. I'd rank the Buyids and Samanids lower than you have them. Last place should be the Hotak, I think, and then Zand maybe next to last. Or the other way around. The Pahlavi should be higher. I think their military was considered the largest in the Middle East at the time, and with lots of American hardware. I'd probably rank them somewhere between 15 and 20. Now, if you changed the parameters and just compare the power of each dynasty directly with each other, then the Pahlavi would be on top by far because their tanks and fighter jets could blow away every other dynasty's military. The Achaemenids wouldn't stand a chance. I don't think I could actually pull off a proper ranking though. I'd second guess myself too much. Do the Kwarezmians go above or below the Seljuks? That sort of thing. I'd just keep rearranging them forever. That said, after some thought I think the top of the list would be (1) Mongols, (2) Alexander, (3) Achaemenids, (4) Abbasids, (5) Umayyads, (6) Sasanians. (The Parthians could maybe be in the top 6, but we know so little about them.) After that it gets hard to choose.
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  332. I think you're right. Maybe it would have worked if everyone were on the same page ideologically, but that sure wasn't the case for Americans in the early republic.
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  333. Thank you!
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  334. In the event of a tie the House of Representatives chooses. Each state delegation gets one vote.
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  335. Yes, it's an awesome show.
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  336. It's true that the Egyptians were using the wheel going way back. But racists don't think that "counts" because they think people from sub-Saharan Africa are different, so that's what I focused on in the video.
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  337. @Joseph Abello Thank you. Yes, it does get tiresome. The ironic thing is the more they dunk on the video, the more the algorithm thinks people like it and the more it gets recommended. The video had pretty much died at 22K until the racists found it last week and lost their f***ing minds.
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  338. What's wrong with zooming out? The target audience of this video wasn't history geeks.
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  339. I never thought of that before. That's a really good point.
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  340. In 1790, the U.S. population was 5% urban and 95% rural.
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  341. More videos about Iran, or more videos doing an overview of a country's history?
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  342.  @agaperion  Yes, but they take a lot of time to prepare so not very often.
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  343. This is from memory. The details might be a bit off. In New Hampshire and Massachusetts you'd go to the town meeting and write a name on a slip of paper you provide yourself. In Pennsylvania the federalist and anti-federalist factions each had meetings and drew up a slate of ten electors. They were printed in the newspapers. I don't know if the voting itself was by writing on paper or by voice, but you'd at least know who to vote for. Not sure about Delaware. I'm guessing you just come up with three names and write them on a piece of paper. Delaware was small. Landowning men probably knew pretty much all the prominent men of the state at least by reputation. Not sure about Maryland. In Virginia, in the districts I read about, there were two names to choose from. I don't know how they came up with two. I'm pretty sure they voted by speaking out loud. Traditionally voting in Virginia meant everyone was sitting in a big room together in the county seat and a county official would read the name of each voter. When your name is called you stand, announce who you vote for, and the person you voted for would like bow or something to show his appreciation. In all of these states there were newspaper editorials appealing to voters to choose wise men, and usually asking that they make sure the elector(s) they voted for were supporters of the Constitution. I saw some editorials where the newspaper publisher would say, here is who we nominate (i.e. endorse), and would list some names.
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  344. Yeah, Voltaire said that. By his day it was probably true.
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  345. Thanks for sticking it out until the end!
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  346. So that explains where the old word "camelopard" comes from.
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  347. There were lots of religions in the Roman empire over the centuries. I also see no reason why a Roman couldn't also be a Muslim.
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  348. 感谢！
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  349. Washington and Stuart were personally acquainted. Stuart was a physician in Alexandria, just down the road from Mount Vernon, and after the election Washington appointed him to the committee to design the new national capital city. You can read about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stuart_(Virginia_politician) Washington might not have known Blackburn. The only thing I know about him was that he was from Prince William County. Washington lived in Fairfax County. For context, in the 1790 census Fairfax County had a population of 12,000, and the electoral district as a whole had 60,000.
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  350. It's racists.
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  351. Thank you. It's worth it though. Africans deserve to have their history treated the same as everyone else's.
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  352. It's from the filmstrip "Angkor: The Lost City."
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  353.  @kasel55  "Iran" is a modern name ***in English***. Before 1935, no one speaking English had heard of the word "Iran". "Persia" had always been the only English word for the country. I say very clearly in the video that "Iran" was the name for it in the Persian language. This video was for *English speakers*. Imagine if Greece told the Iranian government, "From now on never call us یونان. Only call us اِلادا." The word اِلادا doesn't exist in Persian, and most Persians won't know what it means or what it refers to. That's what happened when Reza Shah said "call us Iran now". English speakers knew about Persia. It was a land of mighty empires and beautiful art and poetry. They didn't know anything about the word "Iran", and many confused it with Iraq. That was in 1935. Today, all Americans know about the word "Iran". They associate it with the Hostage Crisis of 1979-80, so most Americans think the word "Iran" is bad and scary. And it so happens that most Americans still don't know that Iran is the country of the ancient Persian empire, and they still confuse it with Iraq. I made this video to educate Americans (and other English speakers) about your beautiful country. I love Iranian culture and I want other English speakers to love it too.
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  354. That's a good point. I never noticed that before.
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  355. I'm happy to answer questions, and I have had discussions in this comment section with people who disagree with me. But if the question ignores what I said in the video or if the person is rude then I don't reply.
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  356. Your second paragraph is what I mean by ignoring what I said in the video. As I said in the video, the people of the Middle East had horses, and yet they adopted camels for transportation. They went from wagons to no wagons. So coming back with, "The Europeans had horses" misses the point. As I said in the video, the tsetse fly kills large livestock that can be used as draft animals. That's the entire point of that section of the video. Europe's diseases didn't kill draft animals, so saying that Europe also had diseases misses the point. To address your numbered questions: 1. I don't understand what you mean by Saharan versus sub-Saharan Africa. I was talking about Africa in general, except for North Africa which had wagons in Antiquity, and except for the Horn of Africa because I don't know if wheels were used there. 2. I said in the video that wagons and carts were used between rivers and settlements. So again, you are ignoring what I said in the video. 3. Camels pulling wagons/carts was tried in Late Antiquity and it was abandoned. I don't know why. The question of camels pulling wagons is discussed in Richard Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Harvard University Press, 1975).
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  357. That was a rumor about him, but he didn't spread it himself. At their first meeting the monk had to explain that he did not actually know how to extend life beyond a normal lifespan. He was 72 when he made the journey. I was going to mention that in the video but I forgot. Kind of an important detail.
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  358.  @jugo1944  I personally don't think the distinction is important, but racists do. I made the video to address a common racist trope.
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  359. Wrapping one up right now. It'll be up in a few days.
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  360. And future historians will know less about us than about them, because all our communication is electronic via email, Facebook, etc., and none of our messages will be preserved 200 years from now, unlike letters on paper.
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  361. Thanks! I consider advances in medicine and disease prevention as part of industrialization. It's one thing to understand how germs work. It's something else to mass produce and distribute vaccines and to build large sewerage projects.
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  362.  @qazsedcft2162  I know. I saw an opening for a joke and I took it. I think "Good Flag, Bad Flag" fans would say those flags should be changed too. But there's an inherent tension in principles #1 and #5. If you insist on simplicity then you'll inevitably get similar designs because there are tens of thousands of flags and only a finite number of ways you can combine a handful of basic colors and shapes.
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  363. Yes, the earliest ruler known to have used the title "king of Iran" was Ardashir I, founder of the Sassanians. Here is more information: https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/eran-eransah
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  364. That isn't true and easily checked. Do an online search for traditional African architecture.
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  365. Yes, exactly. People get caught up in the romantic story and lose sight of the practicalities. When it comes down to it, a century is a century. We don't commonly work with centuries-old volumes in our day-to-day lives, and ancient scholars didn't either. About the monetary value of the codices -- yes, they would have had value. Depending on the content, some books might have had resale value as is. Otherwise, the ink could be removed and the pages reused. That'd be cheaper than fashioning new pages from scratch. That was more commonly done with parchment than with papyrus, but it was sometimes done with papyrus, and for all we know some of the books in 391 could have been been imported from elsewhere and made with parchment.
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  366. You're welcome!
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  367. Thanks! Я очень радостный что есть зритель в России! Sorry for my bad Russian. I'm glad you like my videos. Thanks for watching.
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  368. Hard to say. The contemporary sources say he did, but it's impossible to fact check it because we have no other sources to fact check it against besides the ones that either say it or don't say anything about it.
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  369. No. The empires that came out of his conquests lasted for over a hundred years after he died.
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  370. That wasn't my argument.
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  371. Yeah, I wonder what a resident of the actual city of Rome would think about all this.
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  372. Well, most Americans were Christian at the time, a far larger percentage than today. Some were devout, and some were just nominal Christians. Church-going was very common. But they didn't self-consciously call the new country a "Christian" country as opposed to a secular one. This preoccupation with the "Christianness" of the United States dates from the 20th century as a reaction to the mass falling away of Americans from Christian belief. Fun fact: In the early days of the Republic, New England was the Bible Belt and the Southern states were not as religious, relatively speaking.
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  373. Thanks! Yes, I hope to do more videos about the medieval Middle East. Other naming conventions is a good idea, too. Maybe I could explain the naming of Chinese emperors, if I ever figure that out myself.
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  374. That actually sounds like a cool idea
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  375. That's the way to do it
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  376. Identifying an ethnicity for a specific family is not straightforward because it depends on how you define that identity. Ismail I's mother was the daughter of Uzun Hasan (considered Turkic, I believe) and a Greek princess from Trebizond. That presumably makes Ismail 1/4 Greek, among other things. But then to know for sure we'd have to look at her parentage, and then theirs, and then theirs, ad infinitum. I group the Safavids among the Turkic dynasties because culturally they acted Turkic, at least in the 16th century, and the basis of the dynasty's power was the Qizilbash, who were culturally Turkic.
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  377. I know what you mean about not being able to watch a video where they keep mispronouncing something. In this case though you don't have to worry. Historians who specialize in the history of the Mongol empire all pronounce Genghis with a CH or J sound. That's because in Mongolian his name is Chinggis Khaan. In pretty much every other language he's called Chinggis or Jenghis. English is the only one (as far as I know) where his name is pronounced with a hard G.
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  378. Pretty sad that people follow accounts like that, but I don't think there's any basis for legal action. Just someone sharing an opinion on social media.
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  379. Yes, that's true. There are depictions of chariots in art in the Sahara. But they don't seem to have been used in the Sahel or to the south, and use of chariots disappeared in North Africa in ancient times.
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  380. Those weren't parties
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  381. Chengis is the standard pronunciation among academics. I say kon because "Chinggis Haan" would sound too unrecognizable to a lot of the audience. The s-kh combo is hard for me to pronounce in normal speech so I veer toward s-k.
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  382. Similar lifestyle historically. Different language family.
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  383. I'm glad someone brought up donkeys! When I posted the video I thought I'd get that a lot, but hardly anyone has brought it up. Yes, donkeys were used as pack animals in the Sahel in West Africa, and I believe also in Ethiopia and what is now Sudan. I didn't talk about them because I wanted to keep the video brief and on task. I was going for big picture stuff, and I was focused on addressing a common Eurocentric trope, the lack of wheeled vehicles in sub-Saharan Africa. Bringing up donkeys in the Sahel would require a whole discussion of why they used them as pack animals rather than for pulling carts. But I already had two big points I was trying to make: (a) the way we frame the question is Eurocentric, and (b) trypanosomiasis precluded the use of draft animals in most of tropical Africa. True, I used "African" as shorthand for "sub-Saharan." But that was because of the purpose of the video. When people are dismissive of African history and traditional cultures, telling them something was done in North Africa doesn't matter to them. They consider North Africa before Islam as an extension of Europe.
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  384. Thank you!
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  385. At the time. The owner of the New York Herald hated Johnson and Seward and harped on how bad the deal was all through April. The political cartoons that they always print in modern textbooks in the part where they talk about the Alaska Purchase come from that. Some other newspapers also made fun of the deal, but usually in the spirit of "let's have a cheap laugh" more than "we have a serious objection to this policy decision," but they would also say stuff like "Seward's Folly".
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  386. What @O.Shawabkeh said. Women are Umm (mother) instead of Ab (father), and bint (daughter) instead of ibn (son). The names were constructed the same way.
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  387. Just the first
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  388. Just saw the video. It's really good. Thanks for the tip!
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  389. This is great! Thanks for suggesting İlber Ortaylı. I'm glad to see that some of his work has been translated into English. I'll be checking him out.
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  390. Thank you!
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  391. There were no animals in the Americas suited to pulling wagons.
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  392. This is an honest question - there are Africans today working as engineers and as mechanics. How do they do that if their minds cannot conceive of the wheel?
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  393.  @dakapo8985  Mongols had an incentive to use wagons, since they needed yurts to protect from the cold winters there. Africans didn't need big heavy yurts to protect them from the African winter, so they didn't need wagons to carry yurts around.
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  394. Not true. It was part of Russian America before the Purchase.
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  395. Yeah, Genghis Khan wasn't too interested in that advice, either.
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  396. I noticed it too during editing. Apparently it's only affected the last two videos. I'm still trying to isolate the cause.
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  397. There are black men today working as mechanics and engineers. How is that possible if they can't comprehend the wheel?
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  398. Thank you!
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  399. It was more that the rulers of Egypt had a lot of wealth at their disposal and provided generous patronage opportunities to scholars -- in the early Ptolemaic period, anyway.
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  400. Thanks!. I don't think you're simplifying. The Federalist/Republican divide had very much an urban/rural dynamic. The Republicans especially made a big deal about it The Barbary Wars is a good idea. I'll add it to the list.
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  401. I propose you take your time machine back farther, before the Industrial Revolution. In 1800, Manhattan's population was 60,000. New York City only extended up to Greenwich Village. Everything north of that was farms (where modern Midtown, Upper East and West Sides, etc., were). Brooklyn had 6,000 people.
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  402. I didn't know about the Gatling guns. But yeah, they didn't resolve their border dispute until 1903.
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  403. Good point
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  404. Thanks, good idea
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  405. Thanks! Yes, I have more coming. The next one should be up later this week.
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  406.  @smirking8457  Fair enough. Just so I don't further misunderstand -- are we saying that white people and black people are different? If so, in what way are they different?
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  407. I do hope to do one on this at some point.
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  408. Did you only watch part of the video?
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  409. I agree, humans can be pretty gross.
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  410. I'm making a video about the wheelbarrow question, but the short answer is that most cultures never used the wheelbarrow before modern times, and based on that I'm just not convinced that a wheelbarrow is inevitably the better option. The ancient Greeks and Romans didn't have wheelbarrows. The earliest wheelbarrows in Europe appeared in the central Middle Ages. And even then, they did not immediately replace alternatives, like carrying it on one's back or using handbarrows. A handbarrow is like a wheelbarrow but it has handles on both ends and is carried by two people. With watermills I think the question is more complicated because you have to look at the local conditions (availability of suitable rivers combined with a large concentration of high-yield agriculture). I don't know of any scholarly literature that has tackled the question, but I suspect there won't be a blanket answer for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.
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  411. Someone fed them after midnight 🙁
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  412. Thanks!
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  413.  @SomasAcademy  In the video I was talking about livestock that could be used for traction. I only said "livestock" at 10:25 but from context I hope it's clear I was talking about livestock that can pull carts. I had a thesis to communicate regarding the use of the wheel. It would have been extraneous to the video for me to talk about small livestock. Medieval Ghana was in the Sahel. I didn't talk about that region at all in the video. That has its own unique circumstances with regard to the question of wheeled transport, and I wanted to keep things simple. Just to clarify, I didn't say that resistant breeds originated recently, only that their spread southward is recent. My source for this is Paul Starkey, Emmanuel Mwenya, and John Stares, Improving Animal Traction Technology: Proceedings of the First Workshop of the Animal Traction Network for Eastern and Southern Africa (ATNESA) Held 18–23 January 1992, Lusaka, Zambia (Wageningen, The Netherlands, 1994). On page 73 it says that trypanotolerant cattle are found in the northern part of the West African forest areas (e.g. southern Senegal, northern Cote d'Ivoire, northern Benin) and are used for plowing (doesn't mention traction), but in the coastal areas "there are very few cattle and no donkeys." It also says on the next page, "The southern limits of the trypanotolerant cattle, the zebu cattle, and donkeys seem to be extending southward year by year. ... Cattle are increasingly being brought into the coastal area, and animal traction is steadily spreading southward in most countries in West Africa." The article "Genetic Resistance to African Trypanosomiasis" that you mentioned doesn't address the original range of trypanotolerant cattle or whether they can pull carts, but it does say that the resistance of N'Dama drops as exposure to tsetse challenge increases (p. 313). Maybe that could explain why they were restricted to the northern band of the West African forest zone (assuming Starkey is correct that they were)? The other article you mentioned, "Unraveling Admixture, Inbreeding, and Recent Selection Signatures," seems to say that only dwarf breeds of West African Shorthorn are found in coastal areas. It says the smallest, the Lagune breed, reaches 93 cm at the withers. That's one yard. Holy cow that's small. Pending further information about them, I'm going to tentatively go with the assumption that they couldn't be used for traction. It seems like perhaps there was some miscommunication among the three of us (including your professor). My source, Starkey, was talking specifically about cattle for traction, and that was what I was interested in for the video. Perhaps your professor thought I was talking about all livestock, including dwarf cattle unfit for traction.
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  414. The Age of Federalism by Elkins and McKitrick is pretty good for this era: https://academic.oup.com/book/9356 I haven't heard of any efforts to restore the Electoral College like that. It would only work that way if there were no political parties. The only serious movement to change the EC that I know of is the NPVIC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact ), but that would push it in the other direction, to making the EC meaningless by instituting a de facto popular vote.
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  415. Thanks!
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  416. That's really cool. Is that from the Thrawn books? I've always suspected the EU had more elaborate worldbuilding than what we saw in the movies.
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  417. 10:17 The mausoleum of Ataturk in Ankara is breathtakingly overwhelming in its size and starkness. I strongly encourage you to see it if you can. And very much NOT in keeping with Muslim values. It's a great example to include in this segment.
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  418. Thank you!
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  419. Good luck! I hope you're able to.
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  420. Thanks for watching! I love your channel. Your description of the Federal Council of Australasia does sound like the Articles of Confederation, the system the U.S. had before the Constitution. No taxation power, authority very limited. It also included (this is not specific to the Federal Council of Australasia, but fun fact) a provision saying Quebec (which then included modern Ontario) is welcome to join anytime, which is reminiscent of a certain clause in the Australian Constitution. They didn't carry that over to the current U.S. Constitution. I think if the Framers had known about preferential voting they may well have implemented it for the Electoral College. As I recall, when the idea of the Electoral College was discussed, one objection was that every elector would just vote for someone from his own state. So the solution was give them all two votes and require that at least one of them be for an out-of-stater. That's why they got two votes each. If they had had preferential voting then they could have just let them have one ranked vote. Might have been less clunky.
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  421. He stayed at 3 Cherry Street, which no longer exists but I believe was located somewhere under or near the present-day Brooklyn Bridge a little southeast of Pearl Street. Here's a map of New York from 1789: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3804n.ar111300/ Pearl Street was called Queen Street back then. I believe his office was in the residence, but I don't know for certain.
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  422. As a matter of fact I did a reaction to that video on Twitch. The VOD should be available for another couple of weeks I think. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2308267854
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  423. I agree, that would be interesting.
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  424. The electors are still persons nowadays. It's an honorary role now. In each state, the political parties in that state choose a list of names of people they would want to be electors. If their party's candidate wins that state, then that party's slate of electors is chosen to vote in the Electoral College. Since the electors are partisan, it's extremely unlikely one would vote for the opposing party's candidate. Like you say, it's like a concept now. The electors are supposed to rubber stamp what the voters did, so the Electoral College just functions as a points system now. They do occasionally vote for someone else though -- another high-level person in their same party. It's always understood as a symbolic protest vote. An elector who does that is called a faithless elector. In most elections either there are no faithless electors or just one, and they have never affected the outcome of the election. 2016 had seven faithless electors, which was an unusually high number. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election
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  425. It all started on March 15 when a white supremacist tweeted about it. Then it spread to 4chan, ifunny, and discord.
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  426. I wouldn't say they dominated. They were certainly able to push people around. But the locals were usually able to hold their own. You could argue their naval technology was marginally better, but not to the degree that they could enforce their will on everyone. The Europeans won some and the Asians won some. That was vague I guess, so to be more specific... In the case of China, the Chinese banned Japanese ships from their ports because of rampant Japanese piracy. The Portuguese showed up and got the right to run trade between China and Japan. In Malaya, the Portuguese and Acehnese were evenly matched. The Ottomans shipped guns and cannons to the Acehnese, and also they captured Portuguese guns. In the Arabian sea, sometimes the governor of Gujarat would send out ships against the Portuguese, but usually the rulers in India didn't bother doing anything about it because they still got their luxury goods regardless and just didn't care what happened to Indian maritime merchants. The Ottomans sometimes put fleets in the Indian Ocean, but their focus was on fighting the Habsburgs in Europe and the Mediterranean -- and (it hardly needs saying) the Ottomans were in no way at a technological disadvantage there. I realize that just addresses the Portuguese phase, but this comment is already long. As for the Atlantic side of Africa, as far as I know no Africans had bothered to go onto the ocean, so the Portuguese won by default.
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  427. The dictionary is called Hans Wehr. It's the standard Arabic-English dictionary that all English-speaking students of Arabic use. Most people use the green paperback edition. You can probably find a used one pretty cheap. Students are usually introduced to it after a semester or two of college Arabic. You have to be comfortable with the Arabic alphabet and also be used to the root system. Arabic dictionaries arrange entries according to what three-letter root the word belongs to. But if you're going to pursue Arabic, you'll definitely end up getting a copy. As for what other resources to use a beginner, I don't know. The landscape has changed enormously since I started learning Arabic twenty years ago.
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  428. I agree it's fascinating, but I think you're wise to be cautious. Not quite the same of course, but there is some nice Islamic architecture in Spain.
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  429. I was going to have the face of Obi-Wan Kenobi pop up when I said that, but I didn't think it would work organically in the video.
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  430. And me, two weeks ago, naively thinking this video MIGHT get 200 views and 5 comments.
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  431. Thank you, but no. If you spoke Arabic for 57 years then you definitely know way more than me.
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  432. The official count is 1.4k dislikes
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  433. There were definitely famines sometimes in the Middle Ages. But they would have been scrounging up bad grain rather than bad meat, since that's more of what they would have had around. Also they would have been eating carcasses when they found them, but that's of course only in a bad famine when everyone is starving. People didn't keep meat sitting around like we do today with our refrigerators, so they wouldn't have faced the option of eating spoiled meat like we would. As to where the myth started, I don't know, but it must have something to do with modern people's need to dump on the Middle Ages. That's been going on for several centuries now.
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  434. I came across that while researching for the video, but I read that the source it comes from is not entirely reliable. I don't remember the details, unfortunately, but that's why I left it out.
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  435. So the Karamanids finally got their revenge on the Ottomans in the form of Atatürk. I like that. The thing about the Arabic alphabet is that it only really works for the Arabic language, and the other Semitic languages since they have the same structure. The Arabic alphabet fits the Arabic language beautifully. But when it's used in unrelated languages like Turkish or Persian it's an awkward fit.
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  436. I've met Africans and Black Americans. They were as intelligent as white people. I can't figure out how anyone could think they have an IQ that low, unless you've just never known any and have been misinformed.
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  437. That makes a lot of sense. I can see how a stable process could have been worked out with national parties coordinating which electors vote for whom. Some elections might have had some strange results though, like 1824 or 1860.
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  438. Thanks! No, I don't have a blog.
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  439. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Genghis%20Khan
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  440. Thanks! As far as I know the potter's wheel wasn't used south of the Sahara -- except maybe in Ethiopia, I don't know about there.
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  441.  @jap7384  That's so meta. 🙂
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  442.  @stephenchappell7512  Oh, good point! We can add 480 to the list of alternate dates.
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  443.  @stephenchappell7512  Good point about the Turks and Latins calling the Byzantines Rome (Rum, Romania). After the Turkish conquest, that was what the rest of the Muslim world called the Turks. There was for example a Seljuk dynasty in central Anatolia, the Seljuks of Rum, so called because they controlled what the Muslims regarded as Roman territory.
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  444. He wasn't Zhang Guolao. He was Qiu Chuji (丘處機). The Daoist Canon says he was 73 (72 by Western reckoning) when he made the journey to see Genghis Khan. I think the idea that was 300 was just a rumor. Here is the Wikipedia article about him: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%98%E5%A4%84%E6%9C%BA
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  445. Thanks for watching, though!
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  446. Thank you so much!
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  447. Yes, unfortunately
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  448. Just in YouTube comments, but yeah, I've gotten it a couple times.
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  449. Coincidence? I think not!
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  450. You mention a huge ass bridge so I guess you're alluding to PEI? I did include it. At the time of the American Revolution it wasn't called Prince Edward Island yet. It was St. John's Island. That's how I have it labelled on the map at 12:22.
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  451. Thank you, this is really interesting!
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  452. The best book to start with is Michael Axworthy, A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind.
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  453. Yes, there are several other dates I could have mentioned besides the three I talked about in the video. The end of the Empire of Trebizond in 1461 is one of them. Also, the Russians and the Ottomans both claimed to be continuations of the Byzantine empire, so then we could add 1917 and 1922 as two other possible dates. I would put these three (1461, 1917, and 1922) in the same category as 1806, i.e. dates that could be argued to be technically correct but that are never used by modern historians for the fall of Rome. I didn't think of it at the time, but in retrospect I maybe should have also talked about the Russians and the Ottomans in the video. But that would have made the video a lot longer, trying to explain why the Russians and Ottomans could be considered continuators of the Romans. And then, incidentally, the Safavid shahs were descended from the emperors of Trebizond, so by virtue of descent maybe we could add them to the list (which would add 1722 or 1736 as candidates, depending on when we date the end of the Safavids). But they never claimed the title "Roman emperor", and IIRC they tended to call the Ottomans "Romans", so they probably shouldn't count.
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  454. Nice username! Eccleston is my favorite NuWho doctor.
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  455. Did I say Newfnlnd? I don't remember. I try to pronounce the "land" because that's how I've heard Canadians say it. But I'll be honest with you, I'm not going to try to say it with a Newfie accent.
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  456. They're two different ways of pronouncing the same word. They're written the same. When it's in the middle of the name it's spelled "bn" (vowels are usually not written in Arabic). "Bin" strikes me as more dialectical and "ibn" more formal or classical, but I'm neither a native speaker nor fluent, that's just the sense I get. In books about the medieval Islamic world, names always have "ibn" and never "bin." But modern Gulfis seem to use the form "bin" a lot.
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  457. High technology? I never said that.
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  458. I don't think of the 1500s as a time of high technology.
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  459. Thank you!
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  460. The tsetse range didn't extend that far south. So yes, the Bantu and the white both kept cattle.
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  461. yes please!
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  462. Naming nowadays is similar, but with some modifications. As I understand it, the kunya is always treated as a nickname. Someone will be called that, but they wouldn't write it on a form. In the Egypt/Levant area, people's names tend to be [name] [father's name] [grandfather's name] with no ibn in between, e.g. Tariq Abd al-Razzaq Muhammad, where Muhammad is the grandfather's given name. A lot of people also seem to have nisbas, but not everyone. On the Arabian peninsula, naming is more conservative (in my understanding). When Arabs travel to the West and have to fill out forms, they'll often use their grandfather's name as their "last name" for legal purposes, or they might use a nisba. You can see an example of a modern Arab's name in Yasser Arafat. His complete name on Wikipedia is Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini. Abdel Rahman is his father and Abdel Raouf is his grandfather. On the other hand, Mahmoud Abbas is just "Mahmud Rida Abbas," with no nisba (based on the Arabic Wikipedia). All that said, I don't really understand modern naming customs because there seems to be a lot of variation. Also, a lot of names are hard for me to parse. For example the Egyptian author Taha Husayn. His full name according to the Arabic Wikipedia is Taha Husayn Ali ibn Sulama. I would think Husayn was his father's name and Ali was his grandfather's, but then what's the "ibn Salama"? I would assume, since Ali would have been born in the mid-19th century, that "Ali ibn Salama" was his name. But I'm not certain. Thank you for the kind words. About pronunciation, that reminds me of an old SNL skit where they made fun of U.S. journalists who pronounce Latin American placenames with a self-consciously exaggerated Spanish accent. I think about that sometimes when I'm using Arabic terminology.
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  463. Good question about Yasser Arafat. I don't know much about him so I don't know how he got that name. Some sort of nickname, maybe. The SNL skit I was thinking of is called "Enchilada" and aired in 1990, during SNL's second golden age.
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  464. I like that idea of doing more medieval myths. I had considered doing the one on Columbus and the roundness of the earth, but then I thought maybe everyone already knows that's a myth by now. Maybe I'm being too optimistic? There's a channel called Shadiversity that recently did a video explaining that medieval Europeans did in fact take baths, so hopefully we can finally put that one to rest.
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  465. Don't worry, I fear you.
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  466. Populations were much smaller back then, and people were embedded in networks of social connections. People who knew you usually also knew (or knew of) your family members.
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  467. Thank you!
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  468. Thanks!
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  469. We're literally the same age. 😢
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  470. Contemporaries who wrote about the Mongol attacks always talked about how ferocious they were. People thought the Mongols were pretty extreme.
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  471. Oh yeah, I forgot he was a colonel. In that case I think he must have known him.
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  472. In the early twentieth century Western historians thought the form of cities in the Middle East and North Africa, with narrow, winding streets, was caused by the religion of Islam. But research showed that those characteristics evolved several centuries before Islam. The prevailing view now is that it was because of the transition from using wheeled vehicles to packing loads on camels and donkeys.
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  473. Yes, I think you're right. Just in appearance, the people of Turkey tend to look more like Greeks than Kazakhs, although not always. The cultural side is interesting. There are many cultural similarities among people from the Balkans through Anatolia to Syria. Anatolia has always had so much genetic and cultural mixing, both in ancient times and in the Ottoman period.
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  474. Thanks!
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  475. That is true. Apparently the idea of changing the name started with the Persian ambassador in Berlin, who was sympathetic to the contemporary German regime.
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  476. You're right, museums are a modern thing. The French took the name "museum" from these ancient temples and applied it to the modern institution where they put things on display for the public to look at. Ancient museums were places of worship with cultural activities attached. It didn't have exhibits. They had cultural activities because the muses who were worshipped there were the patrons of those activities. So museums would have, for example, poets and people commenting on poetry. The museums of the early Hellenistic world were indeed status symbols, as a way for rulers to show off how cultured they were.
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  477.  @NanakiRowan  Most of them, their problem isn't too little knowledge but too much pride. Nothing they read here will fix that. They like thinking in logical fallacies because it protects them from having to look at themselves. The way I see it, responding to them is only valuable if there are also other people reading the thread. Who knows, though. Maybe I'm too cynical.
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  478. Thank you for watching twice!
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  479. Hi, thanks for your comment. Disease did play a role. Smallpox hit the Incas right before Pizarro arrived.
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  480. Thanks for the suggestion! I don't know if I'll do any videos on recent Iranian history, though it's possible. But I do plan to do a podcast on Iranian history, possibly next year, and I would eventually cover recent events there.
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  481. Thank you!
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  482. Thanks for watching the video! The evidence is in the letters people wrote. I cite them in the footnotes.
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  483. Yes, this is my view, too. This is why I personally think of the Roman empire as ending in 1453.
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  484.  @seannolan9857  That might be significant, but not necessarily. The Federalist/Republican split of the 1790s doesn't correspond with the federalist/anti-federalist split of 1787-89. The bulk of the Republicans in the '90s had been pro-constitution in 1789.
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  485. That was later
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  486. It's my understanding that the Etruscans have been found to be indigenous to Italy going back many centuries. There was an old theory they came to Italy from Anatolia as part of the migration of farmers. Maybe that's where the idea of them being Turkic comes from? But that migration of Early European Farmers happened several thousand years before the Etruscans.
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  487. Other sources say the Mongols killed them all. The Mongols did often do what you describe. Often they'd set aside the craftsmen and send them off to China, and kill everyone else.
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  488. Thanks for watching!
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  489. @Finn Henman Thank you! That's exactly it. The video was aimed at our unexamined Eurocentric biases. I wasn't aiming at racism. Weird that they're so obsessed with the video.
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  490. Thank you for watching and for the well-wishes!
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  491. It so happens that my next video will touch a little bit on China. I do have an interest in Chinese history and hope to do some videos on it someday. I don't have any firm plans for videos on China in the near term. Some of the barbarian groups that controlled parts of northern China between the Han and the Sui are unknown, in that we have the name the Chinese historians called them but we don't know what language they spoke. It's possible one or two of them may have been Turkic. For the most part, northern barbarians invading Northern China were other groups, like Mongolic and Yeniseian. I guess the Turks were just a little too far to the west?
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  492. Would England still be called England with a Norman nobility ruling over a larger Anglo-Saxon population?
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  493. ¡Gracias a vos!
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  494. I think you're right. Very likely many of your ancestors were Byzantine Greeks a thousand years ago. And 3500 years ago they were Hittites. The Turks from Central Asia didn't replace the existing population. They added to it.
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  495. There was plenty of trade in Africa, both internally and with other regions. But the volume of trade would undoubtedly have been higher if the population density had been higher. Sub-Saharan Africa always had a really low population, probably in part because of the lack of draft animals.
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  496. The channel Maiorianus has a video in which he makes the case that the Ostrogoths could have reestablished the Western Roman Empire under a Gothic dynasty.
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  497. I don't know much about it. I'm curious how he supports his chronology.
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  498. I think that might be my favorite part of the video.
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  499. Thank you!
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  500. What are the faulty variables the 90 percent figure is based on? It's true that North America was sparsely populated compared to Europe, even before 1492. Notwithstanding that, and notwithstanding the Great Dying, Europeans had settled very little of it by the end of the 18th century. The huge influx of European immigration and expansion across the continent happened after industrialization started. (Note that the figures you cite are for the 19th century.)
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  501. If the insects go, then we're all doomed.
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  502. Thanks for the feedback! I still have a long way to go.
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  503. Yeah, good question.
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  504. Do some Arab countries not issue birth certificates?
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  505. This was put forward in an academic journal article in 2009. His argument seems plausible. The only way we have to date the death of Herod was that Josephus says it happened after a lunar eclipse and before Passover. There was a partial lunar eclipse in 4 BC and a total lunar eclipse in 1 BC. Steinmann also says that all the events that Josephus reports as having happened between the death of Herod and the next Passover would require a minimum of 41 days (and likely more), but there were only 29 days between the eclipse and Passover in 4 BC, while there were 92 days between the eclipse and Passover in 1 BC. Steinmann, Andrew E. “When Did Herod the Great Reign?” Novum Testamentum 51, no. 1 (2009): 1–29
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  506. People could and did slaughter small animals any time of year because they could be consumed in one sitting. Preservation becomes an issue when it's a big animal -- a pig or a cow.
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  507. Good catch! I used that map because it made a pretty graphic for the chapter markers. Trust me, I wouldn't have used a 1910 map for actually showing where things were in 1453. 😀 Rum is Arabic and Turkish, both.
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  508. That's a really good question, and I don't know the answer. Most everything I read was written by federalists.
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  509. Thanks! It's a Samson C02.
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  510. Thank you!
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  511. It often ends up being a father's or grandfather's name, which makes it seem like a lot of people's surnames are just regular first names. Some people pick a nisba that's come down in the family. On customs forms in the region, there isn't a box for middle name but there is one for father's given name.
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  512. Wheeled vehicles became dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the development of trains and automobiles. Before that, even in Europe, wheeled vehicles were used alongside pack animals and human porterage.
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  513. They stopped printing the electors' names on the ballot around the beginning of the 20th century.
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  514. I don't have a problem with seeing genetic subgroups within the human population. The problem is the scientifically-identified genetic subgroups (e.g. DNA haplogroups) don't correspond to continental populations or to the racial categories we use in our culture. In other words, geneticists have found that Africans do not constitute a single, distinct genetic group. The only evidence I've heard for regarding Africans as a single, distinct genetic subgroup different from all other humans and having certain genetically-determined traits in common is that they lacked (or supposedly lacked) certain technologies. E.g. no wheel, no multi-story construction (which is untrue, that did exist), or in a broader sense no technology whatsoever (which, again, did in fact exist). This argument strikes me as circular. "Why didn't they invent the wheel? Because their brains lacked some feature that other humans' brains had. How do we know their brains were different? Because they didn't invent the wheel."
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  515. I don't have the files handy but IIRC it was The Adventurer, from 1917.
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  516.  @RhodesianFur  No problem!
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  517. Thank you!
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  518. Those dioramas are so cool! And I'm excited to see your video about the Classic collapse.
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  519. Thanks! I like your pfp. Great game.
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  520. I'm familiar with the ones in the Sahara. Haven't heard of them in Botswana, but if you can point me to more information I'd be curious to read about it.
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  521. Similar title but different function
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  522. Yes, that's right. Changchun ("Eternal Spring") was a title or nickname. I used that form of his name because that's what the translator went with.
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  523. So sounds like basically the same strategy as when playing Monopoly then. Buy everything you land on.
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  524. I don't know. Maybe it's too warm for Bactrian camels?
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  525. Yes
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  526. Thank you!
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  527. Interesting you should say that. IIRC the Framers insisted on three independent branches because when the colonies became independent during the Revolutionary War, some of them established new state governments with one branch - the legislature - often with just one chamber. It was not a success and within a few years those states went back and wrote new state constitutions with separation of powers. Best of luck to you. It's a bad situation over there.
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  528. @petersmythe6462 Yes, that's true. The bicycle is a simple and obvious mechanism to us, but of course that's because we've grown up with it.
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  529. 14th!
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  530. Ha ha, classic. I love the original series.
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  531. They did, but they were all just nicknames: so-and-so's son, or the town their from, or their occupation. It wasn't as elaborate as the Arabic system. It was just "Which John?" "The John who's a baker" or "The John from Kent."
    2
  532. Some folks in the Near East in Late Antiquity experimented with having camels pull carts. But that was abandoned and they were used as pack animals instead. I don't think I mentioned this in the video, but animals (donkeys, especially) were widely used as pack animals in Europe, too, rather than having them pull carts. There are advantages to that -- you don't have to worry about a wheel getting stuck, and you don't have to maintain the cart.
    2
  533. Cool truck, huh?
    2
  534. Ibn Khallikan said it was yarning, which makes more sense I think. If it were gazelle, the way the word "ghazzali" sounds (ism fa``aal) makes it sound like he's doing something with the gazelle, like he's gazelling something.
    2
  535. Yes, that's right. The P changed to F because of the influence of the Arabic language.
    2
  536. I'm also a huge fan of both Greens. John Green is awesome.
    2
  537. I do know, which is why I have an opinion on those issues. I cited my sources. Footnotes 1 and 2 (listed in the video description and at the end of the video) provide my sources for what I said in the intro.
    2
  538. Thank you! Based on what I've learned so far, I'd say China.
    2
  539. Thank you so much!
    2
  540. The same thing did happen in Africa. Kind of weird that you would display your ignorance like that. Most people who don't know about a subject just don't say anything about it.
    2
  541. My understanding (which could be wrong) is that it's one of those things many cultures have of regarding the given name as too personal for just anyone to use. So the kunya is sort of like a euphemism. Regarding what you do if the person had no child... People could have a nickname in the form of a kunya. That was not uncommon. It might be a play on their name, or something humorous, or just something they were known for.
    2
  542. Good way to put it.
    2
  543. Thank you!
    2
  544.  @smirking8457  Thank you for your help. I'll check them out. Did a little preliminary searching on Yandex and only came up with forum threads with conflicting information and various webpages, but I'll guess I'll just need to do some trial and error and figure out where to look.
    2
  545. Sure, I can do that. I hope to do a followup sometime next year.
    2
  546. Thank you very much! الف شكر
    2
  547. I thought the same thing. I even wondered if they got the term "elector" from them. But probably not. It's kind of an obvious word for that function.
    2
  548. 👀
    2
  549. I never said they're superior to whites.
    2
  550. I don't know. I suspect it's because they spoke a Romance language which distinguished them from their neighbors. They were also called Vlachs. I don't know when the change happened to the new name.
    2
  551. I do plan on doing an in-depth video on that at some point. It's a big question.
    2
  552. I don't know when hand-pushed carts were widely used in the West. I suspect they would mainly be practical on paved streets. It was pretty universal around the world for people (especially women) to carry things on their heads. That seems strange to us but that's what people did, including in Europe. I think we assume people would always want to use wheeled contraptions for transportation because that's what we prefer, but it's probably just something specific to our culture.
    2
  553. Thank you!
    2
  554. Thanks!
    2
  555. An Africanist is someone who specializes in African history. The easiest way to find some is to look at the references section of articles about African history on Wikipedia. Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Africa
    2
  556. I love the Technology Connections-style music and bloopers at the end.
    2
  557. Hopefully it won't take as long next time
    2
  558. They were starting to. Then a junta did a coup and launched Japan on an industrialization crash course.
    2
  559. Yeah, Vietnam definitely had a different experience of the Mongols compared with Central Asia.
    2
  560. I'd like to read more about this. Can you recommend some sources?
    2
  561.  @sepulcher8263  Yes. They were based in the savanna. Here's a quote that might give some context (Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa, p. 76): "In addition to the limits and possibilities imposed by the vegetation and physical environment, there were limits imposed by the disease environment. Although much of the land in the Gap of Benin was good cavalry country, the local disease ecology did not make it good horse breeding or raising country. As a result, the major military powers of the south could not maintain horses, even though they lived in cavalry country. It was difficult for them to resist cavalry armies, but because horses could not live for long in the south, those northern areas where horses could be maintained could not sustain their power in the south once the dry season had passed." Oyo was one of those northern powers that could attack the south with their cavalry but couldn't stay there year-round.
    2
  562. Sources are cited at the end of the video and in the description.
    2
  563. Thank you, this was very interesting!
    2
  564. Very interesting, thanks!
    2
  565. Thank you!
    2
  566. My point about the French revolutions was to reckon with the objections, "But the Ottomans used Islamic law instead of the Roman legal system. But the Ottomans didn't use traditional Byzantine court ceremonial." If the objection is that the Ottomans were descended from immigrants, then yes, France is not a germane comparison. But just so we're clear -- they were descended from immigrants from Central Asia. They were not themselves from Central Asia. By 1453 the Turks had been present on Roman land for 400 years. So, 15 generations or so?
    2
  567. Yeah :) The Taoist Canon says he was 72 (73 by East Asian reckoning). It actually is pretty impressive that a guy that old went on a journey that far.
    2
  568. Offhand do you know which character Li used? I only saw the English translations.
    2
  569. Yes, there were horses and donkeys in parts of West Africa. Donkeys as pack animals were the main means of land transportation there. Pack animals could very often do as good a job as a cart -- in some scenarios better and in some scenarios worse. Each had strengths and weaknesses. That was true even in Europe. The Chinese wheelbarrow for whatever reason did not spread outside of China in the Middle Ages. Neighboring populations didn't bother to borrow it. Europeans had a type of wheelbarrow starting around the 12th century but it was a less efficient design that was far inferior to the Chinese one. I'm sure the Chinese wheelbarrow would have been appreciated if it had been in Africa, but I don't think Africans need feel embarrassed that their ancestors never independently invented it. In your last paragraph, "on the streets" is the important phrase. Wheeled carts are great, as long as they're used as part of an expensive specialized infrastructure.
    2
  570. Here it is: https://www.loc.gov/item/74695319
    2
  571. Okay, thanks! I didn't know it's a normal name for people.
    2
  572. I think that big jump a thousand years ago is due to the new strain of rice in China. It allowed multiple yields a year.
    2
  573. That seems pretty accurate to me. They ruled over them rather than being the same as them.
    2
  574. मेरा पिता?
    2
  575. Thanks!
    2
  576. Thank you!
    2
  577. Thanks. I have some other videos coming along first, so maybe this spring I'll get to it. Anyway, I got to space it out so people don't think this is just a Romaboo channel.
    2
  578. I couldn't remember so I checked a couple of books. It looks like Teb Tengri and the brother, Temuge, didn't get along because Teb Tengri was trying to siphon off Temuge's followers for himself, building up an independent power base. In the Secret History Borte tells Genghis Khan: "Anyone who harms your brothers behind your back, these brothers who are like cypress and pines, will such people let my four little sons rule the Nation when they grow up?" --Paul Kahn's translation (San Francisco, 1984), p. 156 Ratchnevsky wrote in his biography: "It was clear that Teb-tengri sought a trial of strength with Genghis. ... There was no doubt that Genghis Khan was, in any event, determined to rid himself of this dangerous shaman, but it was certainly not easy for him to overcome his superstitious awe of the shaman's supernatural powers." --Paul Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy, p. 100
    2
  579. If you look at actual conflicts, the Europeans in the 16th century were not OP. We might think theoretically that they must have been because they had guns, but it just wasn't how conflicts played out. It took a long time, many generations, for European settlers to spread across North and South America. Most regions in the Americas did not effectively come under European control until after the American republics gained their independence in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
    2
  580. Equestria was helping Britain.
    2
  581. In English, "came from" doesn't necessarily mean "originated in." It can simply mean "lived in." For example, we say that Obama comes from Chicago, but he's originally from Hawaii.
    2
  582. I would also lean more toward the HRE and 1806 if I had to choose between those two.
    2
  583.  @ibrahimmustafa2481  There were some periods in which the HRE held Rome.
    2
  584. Good point. Depending on the subgenre, conventional Anglo-American names can be the right way to go.
    2
  585. I recommend the book The Camel and the Wheel by Richard Bulliet. He explains all this in detail.
    2
  586. Phenomenal video! Thank you for putting it together.
    2
  587.  @WorldofAntiquity  Classic Who! A man of culture!
    2
  588. My understanding is that the Ottoman dynasty was fine with people carrying on the old Byzantine customs (with some exceptions, like no more religious processions or other public displays of Christianity), but the dynasty itself did not assimilate to Byzantine culture. There must have been some cultural mixing in the dynastic family given just how many former Byzantines there were knocking about (including some of the sultans' mothers). But I get the impression the Ottoman sultans treated the title "Caesar of Rome" as a piece of property they had inherited from the former owners of the city, rather than something they actually took to heart. Except Mehmet II -- he seemed to really dig the whole Roman thing. The way I think of it (though I'm not an expert on either the Ottomans or the British, so take this with a grain of salt) is like this: Charles is the Lord of Mann, but that doesn't make the people of the UK Manx. The Roman empire became a component of the Ottoman empire. The Ottoman sultan was Caesar of Rome vis-a-vis his Greek Orthodox subjects (to the extent they cared about such a title), whereas he had different titles vis-a-vis other subjects. The difference with the Isle of Mann was that the Roman empire wasn't a geographic section of the Ottoman empire. It was more like, those subjects whose allegiance had been to the Byzantine emperors, wherever they were in Ottoman territory, were the sultan's Rum subjects. The people of Egypt or Iraq, or indeed most Muslims in Anatolia and Greece, didn't care about Byzantine legitimacy so they ignored the sultan's title of caesar and weren't called Rum. To answer your last question, your hypothetical person/country could call themselves Roman. Whether others would accept them as Roman would depend on their own expectations of what a Roman is supposed to be.
    2
  589. Thanks! Do you know how he got it? In my understanding muzaffar means victorious. I'd understand if he were Abu Zafar (Father of Victory) then it'd be a reference to his military victories, but what does Father of the Victorious mean?
    2
  590. What did Atatürk say about Hector? Hector from the Trojan War? I'm glad I'm understandable! I know how rough it is trying to understand a foreign language when they talk fast.
    2
  591. It's "Incendie Alexandrie" by Hermann Goll. You can find it on Wikimedia Commons.
    2
  592. See pronunciation here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Genghis%20Khan
    2
  593. It was, or at least that's one leading contender. The image I showed was just from a state convention in Syracuse in 1856. I looked for something Republican from 1854 to show in the video but I couldn't find anything.
    2
  594. I was using the terminology of the time. Here's the Maryland Election Law of 1788, section VI: And be it enacted, That every person coming to vote for electors of president and vice-president, agreeably to the directions of this act, shall have a right to vote for eight persons, five of whom shall be residents of the western shore, and three of the eastern shore, and the five persons residents of the western shore, having the greatest number of votes of all the candidates on that shore, and the three persons residents of the eastern shore, having the greatest number of votes of all the candidates on that shore, shall be declared to be duly elected.
    2
  595. That's a surprising distinction. Are the Greeks in Istanbul called Rum or Yunan?
    2
  596. That makes a lot of sense.
    2
  597. That's awesome. What a cool coincidence. And thanks for reminding me about The Magnificent Century. I heard about it years ago but I couldn't find it with English subtitles. But I just checked and it looks like there's a version on YouTube with subtitles now. I'm excited to watch it.
    2
  598. Yes, except they didn't use camels south of the Sahara. If they had to haul something they carried it.
    2
  599. Thanks!
    2
  600. Good question. I believe they followed the same pattern, but the actual names they'd insert into the pattern would be different.
    2
  601.  @seannolan9857  No way. Smith Thompson was clearly the best man for the job.
    1
  602. I don't know what the formal name for it is, but it's an engraving by Amos Doolittle of Federal Hall in New York (long since demolished). For some reason you can't download it from the Library of Congress website, but it's also available here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Federal_Hall,_N.Y._1789_ppmsca.15703.jpg
    1
  603. I loved the music in this one, especially that track near the beginning. It sounded uncannily like something from '60s Who.
    1
  604. Sub-Saharan Africa wasn't dependent on North Africa the way you describe.
    1
  605. Thanks!
    1
  606. Thank you! I guess it isn't as clear-cut as I had hoped.
    1
  607. That's interesting. I had heard that too, that he claimed to be a prophet. So it's interesting that might not be what happened.
    1
  608. Thank you!
    1
  609. Yes, that's right.
    1
  610. Probably a wise choice.
    1
  611. No, just one. Usually the eldest son's name, but that wasn't a hard and fast rule.
    1
  612. Thank you!
    1
  613. The thing is, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. I use the two notations interchangeably in my videos, and I get complaints both ways. When I say BCE/CE some accuse me of being woke, and when I say BC/AD others comment that I'm not a real historian.
    1
  614.  @monarchofthesea9395  I'm not sure how long the Ottoman sultans used the title Emperor of Rome. I suspect they kept it throughout the history of the dynasty, but I'm not certain. I just wrote a really long comment, but it got so long I thought it'd be excessive for a comment section. I think I might need to make a video about this.
    1
  615.  @spvrivs  Good to know. That certainly bolsters their position.
    1
  616. Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L-fANosu-E
    1
  617. Fabricate?
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  618. I agree. Al-Jahiz was very cool.
    1
  619. Yes, you're right. The process of imperialism was very complex and there were definitely other factors involved. The video would certainly have been strengthened by including specific examples to support my argument, although with such a broad topic I'd need to bring in a lot of examples, which would make the video a lot longer. I only meant for it to present a broad concept quickly. That said, it does not represent my current approach to video making. I wouldn't make this video in this way if I made it today. In my current thinking about the direction of this channel, I'm moving toward talking about historiographical issues, or at least trying to and seeing if anyone would watch that. In this video I just present my own interpretation. But I would rather it be me presenting what the state of the field is on this question, and only then maybe state my own opinion on it.
    1
  620. When the Portuguese arrived at the Congo in 1482, the War of the Roses was still being waged in England. Warfare there consisted of archers and melee weapons (axes, daggers, etc.). Cannons were used in sieges, but handheld firearms, while they were used, played a minor role. The Kongolese army in 1482 consisted of a core of heavy infantry, called "shield bearers" who carried swords, and a larger number of light infantry who would fire arrows at the beginning of battle and then close in for hand-to-hand combat using axes, daggers, etc. Warfare did work differently. Europeans at the time avoided pitched battles and preferred sieges, while in Central Africa they tended to prefer pitched battles. But I don't see a big technological gap here. European handheld firearms in the 1400s sucked and consequently were not widely used. European armies focused on archers, cavalry, and pikemen. It was only slowly, over the course of the 1500s and 1600s, that European firearms improved to become the main infantry weapon.
    1
  621. Thanks!
    1
  622. قليلا فقط
    1
  623. حانشوف، سنرى ماذا يفعل الله
    1
  624. https://parasitesandvectors.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13071-020-04555-8
    1
  625. Hi Cyrus, you are correct. The name Iran is very ancient. What changed in 1935 was what foreigners called the country in their foreign languages.
    1
  626. Thank you!
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  627. As @emilybarclay8831 said, it's a politeness thing. Acquaintances and even friends would call each other that form of their name.
    1
  628. @BigMackWitSauce I'm glad you went ahead and watched. I know what you mean; there's a lot of bad content on YouTube.
    1
  629. Thank you!
    1
  630. In 1789 every state was predominantly rural, by a wide margin. So yeah, the Founders weren't thinking about that.
    1
  631. Thanks for the shoutout!
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  632. Wow, thank you!
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  633. Thanks!
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  634. The history of the Filioque would be a much more arcane rabbit hole. I'm not sure how to approach it without appearing to take sides in the debate.
    1
  635. Yeah, the connection isn't super obvious. The Mongols thought bathing in rivers made Tengri mad and he'd make storms.
    1
  636. Interesting to hear about an attempt at an electoral college in another country. Thanks for sharing!
    1
  637. Yes, I saw it a long time ago. He does great stuff.
    1
  638. Good point about the Parthians.
    1
  639. Both. I think of the dynastic family itself as Macedonian, but also since they ruled Persians I count them in the line of Persian dynasties. I think of the Ptolemies in similar terms. Until recently it was pretty common for the rulers of a place to be different culturally and linguistically from the people they ruled, which makes it hard to answer a question like this simply.
    1
  640. I hope to do something on them someday. It's on the back burner for now.
    1
  641. I can do that. While I figure out the best way to set it up as a podcast, would it be useful to have the mp3's available for download somewhere?
    1
  642. Thanks!
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  643.  @kasel55  First of all, my comment was in response to Mr. Ghorbani, not to you. Second, I know the name Iran is ancient. I said in the video that it was the preexisting name in the Persian language. Third, yes, actually the issue IS what Reza Shah told foreigners to say. That was the whole point of the video -- what English-speakers call the country. It used to be that "Persia" was the English translation of "Iran." Then Reza Shah confused the issue for English-speakers. This video is not about what Persian-speakers should say. Fourth, I find this hatred toward the word "Persian" bizarre and confusing. Do you call your language Farsi, Parsi, or Persian when you are speaking English? All of those words come from the same origin, as I explained in the video. Why are you angry about "Persian" but you say "Parsi"? That would be like an English speaker saying "I speak English" and then being mad at Persians for saying the word "Inglisi".
    1
  644. I don't know. I didn't look into that.
    1
  645. For whatever reason, in English-language scholarly literature only "Abd Allah" is written. I never really thought about why. But Abu/Aba/Abi is always declined when writing English, as in Ali ibn Abi Talib.
    1
  646. That was one of the main scholarly activities at ancient museums.
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  647. Thank you!
    1
  648. Absolutely. I realized it as soon as I saw the footage. But at that point the thought of going back and re-recording everything hurt my soul. Then I thought, well, it's not too bad that the A-roll is messed up. This is a super obscure topic and it'll only get like 2,000 views. I'll just get this video behind me and move on. It never occurred to me that this many people would want to watch it.
    1
  649. He wasn't, but the Mongols adopted the Uighur alphabet when they started writing.
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  650. I don't think history is just war. There are many other things in history: social practices, lifestyles, cultural ideas, economy, politics, science & technology. Relatively few people (compared to the general population) died in wars.
    1
  651. Merriam-Webster Dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Serapis American Heritage Dictionary: https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=Serapis The pronunciations you've heard are nonstandard.
    1
  652. The peak of the Portuguese empire in Africa, in terms of how much territory was controlled, was the twentieth century.
    1
  653. Yes, that's true!
    1
  654. He didn't claim to be 300 years old. That was just a rumor going around about him. He was 72.
    1
  655. Thanks! I speak General American English. When I was very young I spoke with a regional accent, but in later childhood I eliminated it in favor of General American. But there are still a few (very few) features left over. For example, I tend to pronounce 'oil' /ɔʌl/ instead of /ɔɪl/ (same with words that rhyme with 'oil'), and I tend to say 'skillet' instead of 'frying pan' and 'chest of drawers' instead of 'dresser'. But in this video I don't think any of my regionalisms came out. When I listen to myself (e.g. while editing my videos) I don't notice a difference between my accent and the accent of TV announcers.
    1
  656. The only data point I have for his views is that he voted for ratification of the U.S. Constitution at the state convention in Augusta. That's in the New Georgia Encyclopedia: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/edward-telfair-1735-1807/ But that doesn't rule out him changing to opposition later. Are you referring to his role in the Chisholm v. Georgia sovereign immunity case? Or is there something I missed? I could very well have missed something. Georgia history is by no means my strong suit.
    1
  657. This is a perfect analogy. Anyone who objects to the first 3/4 of my video on the grounds that the Ottomans came from outside the Byzantine Empire will have to say that Egypt ceased to exist when the Arabs conquered it, or when Alexander conquered it, or at some other point in time. They should stop calling it Egypt and start calling it something else, like West Arabia.
    1
  658. No one is. I'm doing this on my own.
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  659. Thank you!
    1
  660. Every elector voted twice
    1
  661. Arab women's names don't change after marriage.
    1
  662. That's funny. I can see why non-Italians would find it weird, but that is in itself weird because what else would someone from the modern city of Rome be called?
    1
  663. I've never read it.
    1
  664. I described the Articles of Confederation but I didn't state its name. Under the Articles of Confederation, each state got one vote in the Congress, and Congress only handled war and foreign affairs.
    1
  665. I just remembered. An Lushan was a Turk.
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  666. Good points! I actually didn't realize you could say Abu Mun`im to mean Benefactor. I thought it'd have to be Abu Ni`ma or Abu Ni`am. I still have a lot to learn about Arabic. About the Christian names, yes, that's true. Some early Christians were named Theodoulos, which means the same as Abdullah. Some other Western names have similar meanings, like Christopher ("Christ bearer") and Theodore ("gift of God"). And some Arab Christians today are named Abd al-Masih.
    1
  667. The Rock is a really good example of a laqab
    1
  668. ¡Gracias a Usted!
    1
  669. The Qing is a good analogy.
    1
  670. That's a really good point.
    1
  671. I don't know. Old Spanish names had some resemblance to the Arabic pattern I described. The -ez ending on Spanish surnames means "son of," e.g. Rodriquez = son of Rodrigo, Sanchez = son of Sancho. They'd have a de ___ which is sort of like a nisba. But I don't know if those features were already there before the Muslims arrived, and I don't know if Andalusi Muslims modified their naming system to be more like the Christians of Iberia (e.g. also including the mother's family name).
    1
  672. Thanks!
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  673. That's a reasonable point at which to date it.
    1
  674. @BossX2243 Sorry, I just saw this question. I'm not sure what you mean by pre-planning. All human cultures engage in planning ahead, in that they plan for future seasons and shape their environment to maximize food and security. If you mean more specifically complex civilizations like what emerged in Egypt and Mesopotamia, those emerged thousands of years after farming did. Complex civilizations weren't necessary to farm there, because people did it for hundreds of generations before cities appeared. And people in cold climates like the Arctic and the Himalayas did not build cities early on even though they live in harsh climates. There are challenging conditions all over the world, but early civilizations only popped up in a few places.
    1
  675. ¡Gracias otra vez!
    1
  676. Other parts of Africa had written long-form content waaay later (and like Dr. Miano said, that's not a knock against African cultures). And then when they do show up, in the Middle Ages, they're translations: the Bible in Ethiopia and Islamic hadith and fiqh along the Niger River and Swahili Coast. I wonder how translations would figure into a list like the one in this video. Is it still the oldest book if it's a translation of a work from somewhere else?
    1
  677. Good point. They did think factionalism was a real possibility and something they had to be always vigilant against. I don't know how they thought it wasn't inevitable. I wonder if they addressed that in the Federalist Papers.
    1
  678. Thank you!
    1
  679. The number of the state's representatives plus the number of senators. There are always two senators, so it's the number of representatives + 2.
    1
  680. I've never read it.
    1
  681. I would expect in a name like that that Ahmad is the person's brother or half-brother.
    1
  682. Neither. It was internal debates among the intellectuals who spearheaded the independence movement, apparently based on the social connotations of the words Roman versus Hellene. (Hellene is the current word for Greek in the Greek language.) That's based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Greeks#Contest_between_the_names_Hellene.2C_Roman.2C_and_Greek
    1
  683. It's another possible translation. I personally prefer "slave" because the word "servant" seems to me to imply someone who works for a wage - you work for your employer and in turn the employer owes you money. But the Abrahamic religions don't conceive of God as someone who owes humans a reward for our service to him. (At least, I didn't think they did. Apparently some Muslims in this comment section think God owes them, I guess?)
    1
  684. Yes, that's right. Europeans got that silver after they sailed to America, and then took it to Asia. Therefore the Asians had no incentive to sail to Europe, either before 1492 (because no American silver in Europe yet) or after.
    1
  685. Good point, the camel's endurance wouldn't have been as necessary in Europe. As I recall, camels can carry much heavier loads than donkeys can, but I don't have numbers handy.
    1
  686. I guess it depends on how you define "dominated." I'd argue that we perceive 17th century India and Indonesia this way because we're accustomed to seeing the British and the Dutch as main characters and the local kingdoms as NPCs. If we shift our center of focus to the local polities, the British/Dutch don't look so dominant. I don't think cultural openness to foreign produce is a factor here. The peoples of Asia were already trading with each other before the Europeans arrived. They weren't interested in European goods because they were not competitive with Asian goods.
    1
  687. Yes, that's true.
    1
  688. Do you mean for a person to ride? I don't know. Camels' primary use was hauling freight. People typically didn't use horses for that in any region.
    1
  689. Les drapeaux des départements français et autre subdivisions en Europe souvent sont plus compliqués.
    1
  690. Yes
    1
  691. Thanks!
    1
  692. In the 1800s, conflicts between European and Asian powers were heavily one-sided in favor of the Europeans. In the 1500s and 1600s, that was not the case. You're overestimating how powerful the Europeans were in Asia in that period. Sometimes the Portuguese/Dutch/English would win, and sometimes their Asian opponent would win. You ask, how did the kingdoms in the East Indies fail to defeat the Europeans? They didn't always fail. That's the difference. I'm not saying the Europeans couldn't hold their own. Of course they could. But they weren't overpowered.
    1
  693. Thanks!
    1
  694. Were you guessing before or after you finished the video?
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  695. Yeah, it's interesting the transformation in Turkish identity that happened during the late Ottoman period and going into the Republic.
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  696. @baronOdaighre I love this. This is fantastic.
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  697. The museum must have been referring to the city of Malacca. The Dutch did not control the whole of Malaya. Look at historical maps of what the Dutch controlled in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The big territorial gains, what we typically think of when we think "Dutch East Indies," happened in the 19th century.
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  698. The video is giving a general overview of the Americas. Single cases don't disprove general models. But in any case, technology was not the deciding factor in the conquest of Mexico.
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  699. Thank you!
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  700. Nowadays state laws require electors to vote for the nominee who won the state.
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  701. 9:16 I love the Strong Bad reference
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  702. Thank you!
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  703. Thanks!
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  704. If we follow this logic, then wouldn't we have to say that England ceased to exist in 1066? My use of France was just to counter the objection that the Ottomans did not carry over Byzantine institutions. They changed the legal system, the calendar, stuff like that. I've heard people say things like, "Rome isn't Rome if they aren't using Roman laws," and that's what I was answering. I didn't mean to suggest that the Ottoman takeover is the same in every way to the French revolutions.
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  705. Yes, that's right. I think I heard it didn't work, but the mere fact that they thought they should set one up shows that gunpowder was not the trump card some modern folks imagine it to have been.
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  706. Early in the 19th century, not long after political parties formed.
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  707. Colonization in the 16th-17th centuries was typically conducted by private companies rather than by governments. It wasn't until the late 18th century that European governments started trying to micromanage overseas colonies and send over armies, and that didn't become the standard operating procedure until the mid-19th century.
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  708. In most states, very early 1800s.
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  709. Thank you very much!
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  710. You make some excellent points. I'm less ready to dismiss the medieval Holy Roman Empire than most others are, but I realize that's a minority position.
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  711.  @sriharshacv7760  Yes, pretty much. A bigger Germany that included Austria.
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  712. Thank you!
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  713. 8:52 You need to make a T-shirt of the Chillicothe train wreckage that says, "Big Nope Energy."
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  714. Each party submits a list of people to the state secretary of state. If their candidate wins in that state, the secretary of state certifies that party's list of people as the state's electors. In theory it shouldn't matter anymore who the electors are, since they're supposed to just rubber stamp the choice of the voters.
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  715. CE isn't about being "woke", unless that term means something different now. Changing what the years count from would defeat the purpose. The term "CE" is used because it acknowledges that everyone in the world, and not just Christians, uses a calendar based on the birth of Christ.
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  716. In the Middle Ages, that is in fact how Greeks used the word romaioi.
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  717. Very true
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  718. Hi, thanks for watching. Check the sources I cite at the relevant moments in the video. Put briefly, if he had wanted to serve, then he made a nuisance of himself with the number and length of his private conversations with advisors telling them he had decided to retire. Those conversations would not have been necessary just to maintain appearances. He actually got Madison to write his farewell address in May 1792. If that was just an act, then it was rude of him to ask Madison to go through the trouble. Other leading statesmen at the time also put forward an air of nonchalance about serving, but at the same time they didn't actively go around explicitly telling people that they were determined not to serve. If you mean even at the beginning of his first term, you're right that we can't take his word for it. It seems clear from his behavior though, like the way he spent the absolute minimum amount of time necessary in the capital so that he could maximize his time at Mount Vernon. And his friends/advisors would remark in their own writings that Washington was doing it begrudgingly.
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  719. Yes, totally agree.
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  720. Sure, you can look at it that way. He got the ball rolling. I guess you could say it's his fault the sons didn't all start fighting each other as soon as he died, because he brokered the agreement among his sons to agree to Ögedei's leadership. Without that they might not have expanded any further.
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  721. They didn't take over much territory before 1800.
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  722. Aesthetically, I like the idea of the Bolsheviks carrying on the Roman Empire, but I don't know how I would justify it.
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  723. Thanks, this is really interesting. Do the various ethnic groups in Nigeria have similar naming practices, or are there differences between groups?
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  724. @leoblack8497 I've been wondering the same thing. Why would a Muslim be embarrassed at the thought of being a slave of Allah? Is this Western influence?
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  725. Lots of indoor smoking, though.
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  726. Stratego? Pish posh! Stratego is a solved game.
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  727. Thanks!
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  728. I knew it! Atlanteans ate dogs!
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  729. Thanks!
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  730. Every party that gets on the ballot in a state submits a list of names of who they want to be elector ahead of time. Then, whoever wins the election in that state, the list from that candidate's party becomes the official electors.
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  731. I'm curious why you think social media are not a good medium for pedagogy? Unfortunately most people don't have the time or money to research topics on their own, and no one can specialize in everything.
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  732. I think it would have gone much better. Funny you should say this -- I just read a paper a couple days ago about approval voting in the context of the early U.S. presidential elections. It was very interesting. If only they had thought of doing that.
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  733. It never hurts to ask.
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  734. Thank you!
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  735. In English, it's okay to say it with a hard G. But in Mongolian it's Chinggis, and in every other language that I know of it's pronounced with either a J or CH sound. Historians of the Mongol Empire, even English-speaking ones, pronounce it that way. That's where I picked up the habit. But you don't have to pronounce it that way.
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  736. Thanks, I'm glad you liked it!
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  737. Thank you!
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  738. What about the two hour rule?
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  739. The French Revolution was like if Jesse James shot himself.
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  740. He got the inspiration from the Ancient Romans. I think the guys in the painting are arguing or something.
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  741. Thanks!
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  742. As I recall from my reading the spread of tsetse-resistant livestock breeds is a modern effort, I think dating from after independence.
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  743. My eyes are up here.
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  744. Yes, I will make more videos about this period.
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  745. Yeah, Indonesia is at the opposite extreme. Just one name.
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  746. Thanks! When I was editing I tried to find an image that matched the flag in the pamphlet and the civil ensign of the Grand Duchy looked closer (comparing the provincial flag and the civil ensign on Wikipedia). I'm actually not sure what the difference is. Is it a different shade of blue for the stripes? I just discovered the original image Ted Kaye used in the pamphlet, and it looks like he did mean to represent the civil ensign: https://www.fotw.info/flags/lu.html
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  747. Watch Al Muqaddimah's video. He explains it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxwaSMfD8ho
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  748. Rumi died in Konya. His tomb is still there. You can visit it.
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  749. It would be a major change to have the state legislatures choose electors again. Most states switched to popular election of the electors in the early 1800s, or even late 1700s. The last holdout (South Carolina) switched to popular election after the Civil War.
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  750. ¡Gracias à usted!
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  751. Thank you! No, I didn't send it to him. My channel's too small for him to notice.
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  752. Thanks! I've thought about it. My current thinking is if I ever set up Patreon I'll make it a patron exclusive. Not sure though, plans could change.
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  753. Thanks!
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  754. 2/3 of native English speakers are American.
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  755. He did not actually kill that many people. The paper he cites got the history wrong.
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  756. Belgium has a very interesting system. I kind of want to make a video about Belgian political history just so I can try to figure out the Belgian system of government.
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  757. Hugo Chavez transcends time and space. He corrupts elections both before and after his mortal life.
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  758. This is a good idea. I might have to put it on a second channel though. I bet a lot of people who follow this channel don't want that much flag content.
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  759. Yep, that's exactly right.
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  760. Yeah, there were some really bad rinderpest outbreaks in the late 1800s. I don't know much about it, but according to Wikipedia it was introduced into Africa in the colonial period.
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  761. I meant "come from" in the colloquial sense of "lived in".
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  762. Thanks!
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  763. All the stupid comments from morons who think every little remark is a salvo in some great existential culture war is the most exhausting thing about this platform.
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  764. It's true. Mehmet II was a distinctive sultan.
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  765. It's interesting to read the anti-federalists. Their arguments sounded very familiar from contemporary political discourse.
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  766. Keep walking, Grant!
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  767. The electors don't decide anymore. Now they rubber stamp the decision of the voters in their state.
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  768. I definitely thought of that when I was researching the video. Suspicion of government seems to have been a continuous presence in the American political tradition from the beginning.
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  769. Very interesting that in Egypt it palatized and then depalatized. I had always just assumed (without looking into it) that the hard G in Egypt was due to a substrate. I just looked it up and it's a hard G in lots of other Semitic languages, which would have been a clue if I had been aware of that before.
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  770. Regarding Khwarezm, I remember now what Ibn Khallikan was getting at (or rather what his translator explained in a translator's note). Ghazzal is already cotton spinner. The -i is redundant. But in Khwarezm they had the habit of doing that with occupations in general, taking the normal occupation name in fa``aal form and adding a -i. It's as if ghazzali literally means "cotton spinner spinner." That's why Ibn Khallikan felt the need to explain it.
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  771. What did I say that was in bad taste?
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  772. It was a rhetorical device. The humor of it depends on knowing that Europeans are human and never having questioned it. If I really were questioning their humanity then the joke wouldn't work.
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  773. To answer the latter part of the comment, I don't agree with the premise. Consider Europe. There is a 4,000-year gap between the introduction of farming into Europe and the introduction of the wheel. By Crispy Mormon's logic we would expect Neolithic Europeans to invent the wheel immediately rather than wait and borrow it 4,000 years later. During all that time Europeans were farming with no water mills, no pottery wheels, and no hand carts.
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  774.  @Crispy-C12032  I love Europe and I love European history.
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  775. I've already done one video debunking myths people have about medieval Europe and I plan to do more. (The myths I'm talking about are the wrongly held idea that Europeans were barbaric and stupid.)
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  776. If you translate the subtitles, I'll put them on the video
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  777. Thanks for the tip!
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  778. Yes, some of them were. At least Bayezid I's mother, and probably one or two others. Also some of the sultans' mothers were Albanian or Slavic. The sultans of the 1400s and 1500s had mainly European ancestry.
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  779. Thanks!
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  780. Good question. Maybe Quinton Reviews could make a seven-hour retrospective about it.
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  781. They used wheels for transport in ancient times but stopped using them in the late Roman period. They preferred using camels for transport.
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  782. I don't think wagons ever completely went away in Anatolia. But in North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran the wagon disappeared entirely. Only camels. This began before the rise of Islam and lasted until the early twentieth century.
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  783. That's a good idea
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  784. Yeah, the Constitution of 1787 represents a bit of a backlash against the more egalitarian politics of the Revolutionary period. A lot of the Framers thought a strong executive would be a good idea for its own sake. Hamilton even wanted a monarchy, but he was in very much the minority on that. But anyway, the Framers weren't in the mood for setting up a weak or divided executive, for better or worse. I think it'd be really interesting if the two major parties were forced to share executive power. But when they wrote the Constitution they didn't know there would even be political parties in the future.
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  785. The video on the election of 1792 is still on the way. Probably later on in the Spring.
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  786. Thanks!
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  787. He was 83 years old. I think everyone just assumed he was too old. He ended up dying the next year, in 1790.
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  788. I haven't made that video yet, but I'll link it when I do.
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  789. Thanks!
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  790. "You can call me the."
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  791. Thanks!
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  792. This would be a funny way for him to do a face reveal.
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  793. The wheel was known before the arrival of Europeans? Where did you read that? Do you mean the ancient depictions of chariots in the Sahara?
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  794. I don't think Benjamin Lincoln was any relation of Abraham Lincoln's. Certainly Abraham Lincoln had no family connections that gave him an advantage in life. There is definitely no family connection between George Clinton and Bill Clinton.
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