Ancient Rome

And? It's just concrete and arches.

Concrete and arches which supported around 60 million people, which was a ridiculous amount for that time

That's how prosperous they were

Their population was huge because they conquered a lot of land full of a lot of people. The only thing notable about the population size of the Roman Empire was the population of Rome itself, which was so huge because of Egyptian grain more than anything else.

I'm trying not to play devil's advocate here. I'm just saying that Rome wasn't THAT far ahead. I guess the truth rests in what exactly is meant by "THAT far ahead".

>just concrete

Concrete in the fucking classical period you pleb, concrete that was only surpassed in strength and quality in the 18th century.

>rome was so le advanced
reddit tier meme

Wasn't that far ahead of who?

It's not a meme it's the truth, look up some fucking statistics

The Romans were great engineers, not great scientists. They were incredibly pragmatic and were willing to learn everything from conquered peoples.

Just fuck off back to /b/, you're the cancer of this board

How much do you get paid to post on Veeky Forums?

>put chisel to marble block right outside
>make stupid arc or whatever
>WE WUZ EMIPRE N SHIET WHILE U BE LIVIN I CAVEZ

Well it's not fare to compare Afro-Eurasia to the Americas and anything on the Mediterranean was at one point or another part of the Roman Empire just leaves the Near East, India, and China. Relative to them Rome had nice arches and concrete.

They didn't just have nice arches, don't buy into his contrarian bullshit please

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_technology

0.02€

t.mudshit

I think youre glossing over the insane exponential growth of technology from the 1800s onwards.

How am I glossing over that, the industrial revolution is a different matter entirely

Was hydro power even that ubiquitous though? I mean, to a point you could say steam machines have existed for thousands of years.

I suppose that's why they were the best but didn't seem to progress, like, at all. Greeks created the Library of Alexandria. Romans burnt it down and never cared to rebuild it.

Powerful empires value stagnation. Progress is only valued when there is some outside entity to compete with. You don't need bigger better canons when you are the only one with canons. Once an empire rules it's relative "world", the elite care more about maintaining their status than anything else, and change like technological development only threatens their power.

My point was that more change was made from say 1800 to 1850 in terms of technology than from 400 to 1800 AD, so saying that the romans were as advanced agriculturally and technologically as a pre industrial revolution society isn't breathtaking

It's pretty breathtaking how shit people were for 1400 years

But, they weren't. Europe underwent it's own agricultural revolution before the industrial revolution by using the iron plow and better crop rotation methods that make use of plants such as clover which add nitrogen to the soil.

Technology was actually much better in 1700 than in the Roman Empire. Do compasses ring a bell? And huge sailing ships? The colonization of the Americas in the 16th century couldn't have been done with Roman tech. And what about the printing press and paper? The Romans had neither.

I think it was a revolution on a much smaller scale compared to the early 20th century and the Haber-Bosch process, keep in mind by the late 1800s europe was facing a looming starvation crisis.

I'm just saying that there were significant advancements in agriculture well before the industrial revolution. The ascendance of Europe and all that happened not simply because of the industrial revolution. The trend of advancement that the Roman Empire lacked had started before.

What a ridiculous comparison. You are saying the Romans had shit technology (for their time) because they didn't have 17th century technology?

Yeah the Romans were pretty shit I guess, I mean they didn't even participate in the space race!

I'm saying humans weren't shit for 1400 years because they were developing new technologies throughout those 1400 years

>Rome didn't invent much, but it perfected the technologies of it's day.
That's such a weird thing to say. Most inventions are actually nothng more than refinements of prior technologies anyway, science (and culture for that matter) doesn't exist in a vacuum.

ugh just stop replying to me

>le chinese were unmatched meme

They were though. India and China were far more advanced than Rome.

so you're saying that because human technology was developing, the Romans had the worst technology ever?

Do you realise how fucking stupid you sound?

Wasn't portland cement only invented in the early 19th?

Roman gold mining in Northern Iberia made potent use of hydraulic mining techniques.

Hydraulic or hydro power?

How so?

To be honest I cannot think of that many things the Romans were straight up better at than late medieval or early renaissance people.

Much of the stuff we remember them for stems from the fact that they had a huge somewhat centralized empire.

Don't reply. It's bait

Hydraulic, going by general meaning of the word. It was not the same thing as 19th century hydraulic mining tho.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruina_montium

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Hydraulic, it's late. Still, their utilisation was pretty sophisticated.

>Advanced

Is a bit of a misnomer. Gothic Cathedrals are far more advanced than any building constructed by a classical Roman, both in terms of architecture, the use of stained glass, and the precision of the engineering.

The difference is the scale. Their society was a martial society built on conquest, and the huge amount of wealth flowing into the relatively small number of aristocratic hands allowed them to commission public works projects of massive size and scale. Their agricultural techniques were bolstered by huge numbers of slaves working on vast plantations which the West wouldn't see again until the colonial era.

And the size of the city of Rome had to do with two things
A: an extensive network of aqueducts constructed by the state as public works
B: the conquest of North Africa and Egypt, which were so prosperous and fruitful that the Empire was able to subsidize its own existence by simply handing out the grain for free as a kind of early welfare state.
When the state ripped itself to pieces thanks to succession wars, these things faded from prominence, and Rome went back to being a normal sized city. It's not that medieval peoples forgot how to build sewers, it's just that there were no state wealthy enough to invest in them, as most states in the middle ages were feudal states held as the private property of powerful families that were unanswerable to the plebs or the gentry.

More advanced than the Colosseum?

>constructed by the state as public works
But most public work in Rome were mostly financed by private individuals to score political points.

Right, because the state was mostly held as a trust among wealthy aristocrats.

And eventually those aristocrats stopped investing in public works and started investing in political speculation, leading to the decline of public investment.

The Colosseum is a huge, impressive feat of engineering. However it is still essentially constructed with simpler technology and architecture. They found extremely ingenious ways to make this simpler technology do interesting things, but nothing about the construction of the Colosseum is as advanced as, say, a flying buttress.

Could the people in the middle ages have built a Colosseum? Sure, if there had been a Flavian around willing to invest in one.

think of a slut that every dick in town had a poke into

t anarchy

How bout you guys read something like this: 'The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy' and realize that the Roman Empire was immensely complex and 'advanced' i.e. fish farming in any Mediterranean country did reach the same levels until the 1970's or 80's. There are ton of other examples of hydraulic machines and agricultural techniques that were incredibly sophisticated (though some borrowed).

>Right, because the state was mostly held as a trust among wealthy aristocrats.
What? The state had its own treasury, to which taxes were paid and from which public expense were paid. Politicians (who were by no means necessarily aristocrats, by the late republic most important families were plebeian and most patricians had croaked or become too poor to matter) were expected to pay public works out of their own pocket, the treasury generally only handed out a pittance and the senate expected the man in charge to pick up the slack.
Roman infrastructure only ceased to be maintained a few decades after the fall of the west, and Rome's aqueducts only went to shit because the germs knocked them down during sieges.

I admit that was a generalized statement, but in practice there was little representation in who got taxed and for how much, and the fact that vast swathes of the Roman citizenry were taxed without any representation at all lead to massive unrest.

And after the rise of the Caesars you see a petering off of aristocratic spending in both domestic public works projects as well as foreign conquests because now the political ticket up was no longer with the democratic institutions but with the private court of the Emperor, who maintained the façade of public governance but in practice ruled as an unlimited despot. By the time of the "good" emperors their economy had ossified to the point where if anything were to get done it required the Emperor's personal attention, and by the time that the regime had collapsed in the west, the infrastructure was already dilapidated and in serious need of repair, and the population of the city had plummeted. The death blow, however, was the Gothic War.

And let's not forget that the Ostrogothic Germans were actually quite cosmopolitan and the economy of Italy was actually recovering nicely until the Byzantines invaded and did such a shit job that they needed to send a court eunuch to bail out their general.

The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire is also pretty good desu

>Is a bit of a misnomer. Gothic Cathedrals are far more advanced than any building constructed by a classical Roman, both in terms of architecture, the use of stained glass, and the precision of the engineering.

Gothic Cathedrals have terrible structural flaws and need constant maintenance. The greatest threat to Roman buildings was not neglect and the ravages of time, but scavengers stealing their stone for their own construction projects.

stainedglassattitudes.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/great-mistakes-in-english-medieval-architecture/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauvais_Cathedral

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiens_Cathedral#Structural_defects

>The difference is the scale. Their society was a martial society built on conquest, and the huge amount of wealth flowing into the relatively small number of aristocratic hands allowed them to commission public works projects of massive size and scale. Their agricultural techniques were bolstered by huge numbers of slaves working on vast plantations which the West wouldn't see again until the colonial era.

Europe would not reach the per capita wealth of the Roman Empire until the 17th century.

historum.com/ancient-history/43434-rise-fall-ancient-economy.html

That's not what I said at all, when did I say that

>Gothic Cathedrals have terrible structural flaws and need constant maintenance. The greatest threat to Roman buildings was not neglect and the ravages of time, but scavengers stealing their stone for their own construction projects
But by that logic you could argue that the pyramids were the most "advanced" structures until the modern days because they were certainly the tallest and are still mostly intact without the need of maintenance even after nearly 4,000 years
>per capita wealth
The problem with averages is that they're averages. For example the reason why life expectancy was around 25 in those days had more to do with the huge number of children who died before the age of 5.

Ancient Rome was a prosperous martial society built on naked conquest that started off as a relatively egalitarian alliance of landed gentry and finished as a crushingly stratified economy, with a tiny cadre of astronomically wealthy aristocrats supported by a small middle class of knights and tradesman and a humongous underclass of impoverished plebs and an even larger underclass of slaves.

If we were to compare the economies of ancient Rome with Europe in the 1600's we'd find 1600's Europe to the economy with much stronger and more durable fundamentals.

>Europe would not reach the per capita wealth of the Roman Empire until the 17th century.

For your reference Norman Conquest England sat at 800 US international dollars of 1990

Old St. Peters (built by Romans) was actually torn down because of major structural flaws the late medieval/renaissance masons saw in it.

Vast sums of money and a wide pool of manpower and techniques saw the ability to train and administer solutions that were unmatched until economies could reach that level of redundancy again.

If theres no market for mass produced terra stiglata pots then the craftsman will go off and do something else and the knowledge forgotten or ignored until consumers can afford it.

If noone is buying vast villas or bloody great obelisks then the construction industry will focus on building shorter term, wooden buildings.

If the population isn't living in cities as much then the city planners will move on and hard learned lessons about drainage and planning laws will be lost.

If the authority is not there to enforce law then there is no stability to found the economy and see goods and trade protected along a wide sphere, which means less money.

Rome was one big motherfucker, when its administration collapsed it was replaced by local strongmen and smaller teams of scribes. They could not project even a fraction of Romes power in the same way. Charlemagne managed a big empire but he had to accomodate his nobility and cede authority in a way Rome never managed to do.

>were

It's not over until the fat lady sings bud

Maybe I'm trying to oversimplify things, but why does money even matter? If all the manpower and knowhow are there then what's the problem?

Perhaps it was the new acquisition of new fairly liquid assets like plundered gold and silver that allowed Rome to hire the necessary manpower for big projects. Maybe once that's gone that wealth pools in the hands of the wealthy who aren't willing to give it up for anything.

>Maybe once that's gone that wealth pools in the hands of the wealthy who aren't willing to give it up for anything.

Part of the reason the Empire ran into trouble, a lot of hoarded money and wealthy people who didn't like tax. As well as an economy that just wasn't as advanced as the East. Much of England and huge chunks of the other provinces were still rural in character.

Money does matter, its vital, people need paying, supplies need buying, force only takes you so far.

Rome got a lot of cash looting people, once it was stable and there was noone worth invading things started to stagnate a little, currency got watered down as money left the economy or was taken up as prestige goods.

Another issue with life after Rome was the difficulty taking fortified positions, with smaller Kingdoms it became harder for those Kings to quell vassals and put down revolts so a powerful vassal could cause serious stability issues. Which again has a knock on effect on how much you can trade and how many people you can train.

And then there were the invasions and migrations...

>""""Ancient"""" Rome

It's almost as if the city of Rome was founded in the Middle Ages and the "Roman" achievements are actually more recent.

youtube.com/watch?v=t1Cs3Cvx2MA

yes, concrete which was made from volcanic ash found in the mediterranean, not modern concrete.

So the wealthy became too powerful and the government was starved of the wealth it needed for public works and commons defense.

higher populations.
Different traditions of philosophy that were sophisticated enough in their own ways.
Didn't rely on slavery on the same level that rome did.
Better traditions of metalworking/engineering.

And people say Detroit has it bad.

In simple terms, yes.

There was also a shortage of manpower and failure to recruit citizens and settled people into the army itself.

Romes fall is interesting because it had so many causes but they all finally became to much for it to recover after one or two pushes to many.

Lol. Good trolling.

t. le credible source man

>There was also a shortage of manpower and failure to recruit citizens and settled people into the army itself.
Well that's the crux of my confusion. There was always plenty of manpower. The government just didn't have the will to mobilize the manpower, supposedly because the wealthy didn't give the government enough to coax the poor off their asses.

>Rome has a population of 1 million
Rome wasn't the only city in antiquity or the classical period to be that large.

>their techniques in agriculture weren't surpassed until the fucking 18th century
Really? They lacked 3 field crop rotation and the heavy plow.

At best maybe their agriculture was more developed in a particular area, like the land surrounding Rome. There was little demand to develop it to that extent until the industrial revolution meant that clearing land for crops and irrigation was easier.

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>There was always plenty of manpower
Only if the emperors were willing to leave the fields untilled. Swates of Gaul were literally deserted after a century of pestilence and civil war. The germans were allowed to come in to settle the northern provinces for a reason.

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They were really more master engineers than master scientists.

The only really big thing they invented themselves was concrete, but they had a system that was great at implementing existing technologies on a wide scale,

Edo Japan has a population of 1 million

>They were really more master engineers than master scientists.
I always hear this, but I don't see how they were any different from anyone else. What did the greeks invent? Or the persians? Just for reference.

Well, the Greeks themselves had a saying to the effect of "we invented nothing, we improved everything."

But they didn't invent the arch, or siege engines, or roads.

Of course, there aren't exactly patents we can go looking for.

Now the Hellenistic kingdoms, those guys were crazy prolific inventors.

They didn't fucking invent concrete. Near Eastern civs used it to build shit thousand years before.

Someones not a fan of the Romans

>Romantic myths
Maybe you should stop getting your information from 18th century writers.

>Only if the emperors were willing to leave the fields untilled.
There was plenty of agricultural surplus.

Kek those was an all white, aryan civilization.
Then half-nigger semites came and destroyed them by interbreeding with the aryans.

You think it's a coincidence that in the modern day southern europe and sandnigger countries are all poor shitholes full of brown people?

What advantage in living condition would a Roman have over a 15th century Londoner?

Better diet, abundant water, not being covered in shit all the time.

The dark ages had more innovation of agricultural technology than the Roman era. Roman and Greek farms were usually dominated by absentee landlords that spent their times in the cities while they left the run of the farm to house slaves. They had no idea of progress or of using any of the advanced mathematics they learned as the leisure class.

In the dark ages you see the landlord return to the farm and that there are several advances in technology that makes farming in Northern Europe much more productive and boost the population of Northern Europe against that of the south. Among these are the heavy plough, horse harnesses that allow one to use horses to pull carriages and ploughs, crop rotation, more advanced water and wind mills, etc.

Not to mention that Arabs from Syria and Egypt brought new crops and new and better wells and canals to Sicily and Iberia, vastly improving agriculture there. These technologies had existed in Roman times, but for some reason Romans did not spread these technologies. Romans were good at war and making pleasure palaces and consumption cities, not so much at applying technology to practical matters. They killed Archimedes after all.

For example, the steam engine were invented in the royal library of Alexandria, but it was never used to anything practical. It was just used as a show case of the Pharaohs wealth to his visitors.

Depends on how well off the Roman and Londoner were.

Poor Romans would have better access to running water at least.

Do you have a source on literally any of this? I can't for the life of me find some sort of comparison.

I do believe London had an aquaduct and I can't imagine throwing shit on someone was not a criminal offense.

>criminal offence
>before 1800's

Kek, good luck prosecuting anyone.

I am not sure what you are implying.