Byzantine accomplishments:

Other than Empire building, did the Byzantines do anything? Ancient greeks were about literature, writings, philosophy, and architecture. Did the Byzantines continue that trend? Or were they a poor version of Rome, with a stagnant culture? They seem more in-line with Medieval kingdoms, than Roman-Greek ones.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Byzantine_inventions
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_beacon_system
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how do you think the ressainance happened¡

Hagia Sophia

Flamethrowers.

They never stopped doing those things, only then all of their writing and philosophizing were about Christianity, so nobody today cares.

>Ancient greeks were about literature, writings, philosophy, and architecture
So were the Romans. "Byzantines" aren't real; they were just Romans, and the Eastern Empire was always the more intellectually productive half. The potential progress that was lost to future generations because Romanos split the fucking party at Manzikert is probably immeasurable.

Byzantium is just a name bro.

They invented Russia

The Byzantines constructed a lot of things, some of it remains in Istanbul today, but a lot of it was demolished or went to ruins over time. Byzantine law continued to develop long after Justinian. They wrote a lot of philosophy and literature, but like said, it was mostly about Christianity. They also did the best job of preserving ancient Greek learning. And they invented badass flamethrowers.

Stagnant is not the right word to use when describing the Byzantines. Several centuries of their existence were spent just trying to survive against repeated barbarian invasions. The period from 632 to 800 is referred to by some scholars as a Byzantine Dark Age. Not because the Byzantines were lazy and forgot how to write, but because their entire society was disrupted by nonstop invasions from Arabs and Slavs.

How has Byzantium influenced the development of Russia culture, besides religion and the Orthodox aesthetic and a love for autocrats?

I always thought that had the Byzzies survived to the modern day they would have turned out like pre-Peter the Great Russian, highly xenophobic, self-important, and disdainful of western ways, and would probably become a commie shithole and/or very underdeveloped country filled with WE IZ ROMANS AN' SHIET

>Byzantine law continued to develop long after Justinian.
This is very significant by itself. When we talk of Roman law being the basis of western all western legal codes, we're actually talking about Byzantine law, specifically the Corpus Juris Civilis.

Nah, the Greeks were always sticky fingered peoples, the communist facade started in Russia and spreaded from there and only there influencing nations that were generally in it's proximity (with some exceptions ofc). What I meant was that they civilized the Rus, baptized their leader turning them all Orthodox, gave them their architecture and passed on the Cyrillic they had tailormade for the South Slavs (Bulgarians, Serbs). After the Byzantines fell, Russia was just left as the OP buff love child of Greeks and Slavs that were to further the Orthodox legacy, and they did in places like st. Petersburg and Moscow, along with their Rome-tier expantion. Unfortunately they could never stabilize the vast area that the country covered, and after they killed Nicky things didn't get much better. They industrialised, but still remain fairly messy in the bigger picture.

The arts, music, and philosophy continued through the centuries that the Empire existed. From the sciences was particularly developed the medicine. There is the example of Nicholas Myrepsos, who was the best pharamacologist in Europe, until the development of chemistry. Nicholas compiled and revised Ancient Greek scripts including, but not limited to Galen, as well as writing his own compendium on medical science, named Dynameron. It consists of 48 sections, containing more than 2500 medical formulae, arranged according to their form and object. It is chiefly compiled from former writers, and contains many superstitious remedies. It remained the principal pharmaceutical code of the Parisian medical faculty until 1651.

>yfw the Catholic Church excommunicated all of the Byzantine astronauts and made them take the secrets of spare-faring technology with them to Pluto

Fucking Jews.

Codex Iustinianus

...

Their most lasting achievements were in architecture/engineering and law.

the Hagia Sophia employed never before used techniques to build the basilica such as the pendentive dome and new ways to lay the brick and mortar to disperse the weight of the structure. And the Walls of Constantinople were virtually invincible to any siege weapon until the introduction of gunpowder. As well as other engineering achievements such as Greek Fire being a flame that couldn't be doused with water and sticks to the surface it splashes on like jelly, arming their warships with these flamethrowers made the Byzantine navy the strongest in the world for most of their history.

By far the most lasting influence still felt today is the Corpus Juris Civilis, a law code that laid the foundation for the Civil Law that governs more than half of world's nations today.

The Byzantines were also great at recordkeeping compared to the Western World at the time, with Byzantine scholars taking their academic works with them as the empire fell to Italy, which kickstarted a renewed interest in the classical arts and architecture that brought on the Renaissance.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Byzantine_inventions

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_beacon_system

>In the 9th century, during the Arab–Byzantine wars, the Byzantine Empire used a system of beacons to transmit messages from the border with the Abbasid Caliphate across Asia Minor to the Byzantine capital, Constantinople.

>The main line of beacons stretched over some 450 miles (720 km). Based on modern experiments, a message could be transmitted the entire length of the line within an hour.

Lord of the Rings was fucking real.

I'm crying every night because such great Empire failed.

From 476-1056 they were one of the few countries in Europe getting anything done.

What is that bottle next to him?

>which kickstarted a renewed interest in the classical arts and architecture that brought on the Renaissance
They were the Renaissance

Wthout them, westerners wouldnt get greek/roman knowledge

John Philoponus was the first critic of Aristotelian physics and proposed the idea of inertia a millennium before Galileo and Newton. Granted they branded him a heretic after death which limited his impact, but still...

Lol why didn't they just use telephones?