Why did Roman dynasties have such a short shelf-life compared to Chinese dynasties on average?

Additionally we can verify the dates because the records describe eclipses happening precisely when astronomers can calculate that they should have happened.

The Warring States period could well have had armies in the hundreds of thousands. Large populations and China have long gone hand in hand thanks to easymodo agriculture and rice, and Legalism was a hell of a drug for mobilizing an entire state into a war footing.

Just like how a thousand greek bois fought off 20k persians with minimal losses?

>if it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit and barks like bullshit, it's probably bullshit

This is exactly your blatant irrational and biased shitposts look like.

10k

No Confucianism and respect for authority, legions kept elevating their generals to Augustus.

The Chinese venerated the emperors as the Sons of Heaven and the ruling dynasties as having a mandate from heaven to rule, conditional on the emperors being virtuous and beneficent, instituted a meritocratic exam-based bureaucracy based on a blend of Confucianism and Legalism, and their education included the Six Arts (music, arithmetic, writing, ceremonies, archery, and horsemanship) and Five Studies (military strategy, civil law, revenue and taxation, agriculture and geography, and the Confucian classics), most of which are valuable knowledge for the civil service.

The Romans elevated as emperors whoever had the biggest army, never had a formal meritocracy like the Chinese, and their education system was based on memorizing the classics and rhetoric, which is totally useless for knowing how to actually run an empire.

Solid post.

China at that time depended mostly on wheat and millet. The regions that could support rice agriculture were backwards in those days.

Who memed to you that the Qin was 95?

The Kingdom was old, but the Imperial Dynasty was China's shortest lived.

The Chinese borderline """"worshipped""" their emperors, and by that I mean, acknowledged that him and his dynasty bore Heaven's seal of approval and- along with Confucian dominance later on in the empire- allowed the Emperors a measure of stability. However such acknowledgement could be considered revoked by the populace in light of bad rule, in which men are convinced the emperor lost heaven's favor, and therefore must find a new favored of heaven. Hence all the Revolts.

Meanwhile Romans just had to rely on Imperium. Which is literally the ability to be stronk.

While there are plenty of similarities between Imperium and Mandate (i.e. you both have to be strong to claim both), the fact that Imperium lacks semi-religious authority means the Emperors could find it hard to justify their shit to the Roman populace.

See
Probably copied and pasted Julio-Claudian's 95 years or something

Apart from all the useful posts made in this thread already, you have to remember that the Chinese emperors rarely wielded as much power as their Roman equivalents. That's not to say there weren't willful emperors, there were, but since they had the Mandate of Heaven people just tried to work around them as best they could, with removal not being much of an option.

Plus, the Chinese have always written about terrible periods of disunity and praised those capable of pacifying the country back into a single homogeneous whole. Even if that wasn't the reality necessarily, it was what they believed in, and they would sooner deal with a retard than risk killing him and plunging the realm into another warring states period.

The Roman emperors were either propped up by the army or the guard, or were people powerful enough that decided they would be the new emperors. They never had any kind of long-term vision of the unity of the empire, probably because the empire really wasn't that united to begin with.

The thing to remember is that in many eastern places the emperor is just a figurehead. The real rulers rarely give a shit who's got the title so long as they're subservient and doing what they're told.

Diocletian did try to add the semi-religious authority to the office of emperor.

But then Constantine happened

>t. Gibbon

Jesus Christ are you for real

Rome depended on controlling Mediterranean trade whereas China was relatively more agrarian. The Roman elite's source of wealth and power overlapped with trade while China scolded merchants, thus the Roman bureaucracy primarily served the trade network rather than facilitating massive centralization. While a Roman Emperor could declare himself a God and tie the army to him, his heirs and distant relatives would be challenged by up and coming statesmen.

Rome was in a much more vulnerable position than China, the Med was surrounded by Germanics, Huns, Parthians/Sassanids and later Arab tribes who would take different portions of the coast. The Roman empire would be torn apart and only had about 250 years of blissful imperial rule whereas China was a contiguous blob of land that when split by internal divisions or steppe peoples to the north would eventually return to being a single polity.

The Chinese emperor didn't need to confer power to trade-oriented officials or keep up appearances by maintaining a monogamous marriage, they would surround themselves with eunuch officials and concubines, the former having no offspring (besides adoptees, some of whom could challenge the emperor's power like Cao Cao though they rarely had the opportunity to do so) and the latter whose offspring were all considered dynasty members. If the eunuchs or a concubinal queen mother took over they would maintain the auspices of the dynasty as a propaganda face.

note: the Parthians never reached the coast but they did threaten large areas

So retarded Chinese emperors were less dangerous to China than retarded Roman emperors were to Rome?

Eastern Asian still have highest life expectancy rate despite working 24/7

>Why did Roman dynasties have such a short shelf-life compared to Chinese dynasties on average?

Because everyone was aware that the institution of "the emperor" was a pure fiction. The entire idea was based on a foundation of sand that slowly was debased over the centuries until any two-bit bumfuck peasant from Pannonia could become an emperor if he stabbed the current imperator in the back while he was taking a shit and had a dozen army officers with him to put a purple cloak onto him.

Later emperors tried to invent ceremony designed to safeguard the emperor's life which worked to some extent, since it was much harder for people to get close to him without going through 5 layers of chamberlains and major domos. However as emperors still had to go out and campaign with the men a lot would end up being killed on campaign by their own men.

>[citation needed]

Isn't this the case in most of the world.
For instance historical sources say Cordoba under Islamic rule had a population of half a million. Archaeological evidence suggest at its height it had about 40.000 residents. About as big as it was under Visigoth rule.

When it comes to numbers I'm very skeptical of historical accounts.

Rome was run by emperors. China was run by institutions.

Rome had institutions. It had so many institutions that we still refer to complex bureaucracy as "byzantine".

It's hard to fake fucking dates.

Especially when you have Chinese emperors sending fucking notices in writing to foreign states that management changed.

>It had so many institutions that we still refer to complex bureaucracy as "byzantine".
It was complex to the Feudalcucked Medieval Western European, who coined the term.

Confucian beta philosophy vs Greco-Roman Alpha Philosophy.

I'm not really sure you can even consider these Roman lines as actual Dynasties, just people vaguely related succeeded each other.

Romans hated monarchies, so I imagine they didn't like long dynasties based on that. We have very little factual information about early Roman history, but according to Roman legend the last king was the only one that had descended from a previous king. Since that was one of their legends (possibly based on truth), their hatred of dynasties is pretty deeply ingrained.

That's what a dynasty is.

Why the fuck do people like you even come on a history board in the first place? Your "argument" could just about apply to any civilization, especially the further back in time you go. Are you just fishing for (you)s?

People actually take Chinese history seriously? lmao 3 kingdoms shit is literal high fantasy tier. Next people will say they take Egyptian reliefs seriously.

>he thinks rot3k relevent

ROTK was a historical fiction novel written during the Ming dynasty and has no relation to the official Records of the Three Kingdoms compiled by the Jin Dynasty.

Underrated post. They might be ruled by a half insane warlord, called Caesar, Augustus, Imperator. Etc. but at least he wasn't a *King*.