[cauch]

And yet it's not rare to find people explaining that the roman empire, the roman armies or the roman cities were "all the same". Yet these persons seem to know that in real life population is not limited to 200 or that there is day-night cycles.

The article talks about it, and makes the point that people who created AOE may have been biased by the same misconception that is also visible more generally. And it is an interesting thing to raise.

edit: in fact, it is illustrated by the ridiculous recent Elon Musk fit about "the odyssey" cast, itself fueled by the misconceptions that "having black guys in a roman army is woke because everyone knows the romans are not black".

[onraglanroad]

Yes but Musk is really astonishingly ignorant. I realise he didn't have a classical education but he's the kind of person who would complain about Othello casting a black man as the main character.

[cauch]

Sure, but it is just an example, he is not the only one thinking this misconceptions is "historical".

[onraglanroad]

I'm agreeing with you. Rome was the centre of the empire so had every type of person just as London had as the centre of the British empire.

And I suppose New York as a major centre of the American empire. Multicultural cities are the rule rather than the exception.

[modo_mario]

>Rome was the centre of the empire so had every type of person just as London had as the centre of the British empire.

And yet the kind of diversity you're probably expecting was incredibly rare in both. There's enough demographic data to know that.

[onraglanroad]

That's such a bizarre statement. Diversity was rare in London? Have you ever been there (I lived there for years).

London is quite possibly the most diverse city in the world.

Edit: I thought perhaps New York might be more diverse, so I hedged but it turns out Toronto is! I would not have guessed.

[modo_mario]

I was talking about the past when the british empire still existed.

New york is also diverse but if you look at demographic data from historically not that long ago and are racialising then it really wasn't. Those shifts are recent.

[modo_mario]

>edit: in fact, it is illustrated by the ridiculous recent Elon Musk fit about "the odyssey" cast, itself fueled by the misconceptions that "having black guys in a roman army is woke because everyone knows the romans are not black".

What roman army are you talking about ?

Also yeah the vast vast majority of the romans were not black just like how in some african kingdoms later one could see a very rare arab trader or slaver but they were for the vast vast majority black.

[throwaway676712]

There are reports of black legionaries in Romain Britain as late as the reign of Septimus Severus (himself not very white if you look at portraits).

Black people in the Roman empire isn't that far fetched when you consider Rome had a huge presence in Africa and the Trans-Saharan slave trade was thriving at the time. Rome also had contacts with Merowe (Kush) through Egypt and other client kingdoms in North Africa. It's not a stretch to imagine a small but steady stream of black slaves (possibly manumitted later), mercenaries and merchants trickling into the empire and spreading throughout, especially when one considers that the military was one of the very few social advancement possibilities if you weren't already from an aristocratic or at least land-owning family (Rome would give veterans a money payout equal to all of their 20+ years' service arrears plus a bonus and Roman citizenship at the end of service, allowing one to retire in relative comfort).

So they wouldn't be as frequent as in the US, but they definitely wouldn't be an oddity either.

[wasfgwp]

Equating North Africans who genetically, culturally more interlinked with other Mediterranean people with Sub-Saharan Africans is not exactly right. After all before the Indo-European invasion Europe was almost exclusively settled by middle eastern immigrants (and largely remained so in Southern Europe genetically).

> It's not a stretch to imagine

It’s not a stretch to imagine a lot of things but there is no evidence that was true to any significant degree (besides the demand for slaves in Roman Egypt was likely substantial enough to absorb most of the demand)

[throwaway676712]

>Equating North Africans who genetically, culturally more interlinked with other Mediterranean people with Sub-Saharan Africans is not exactly right. After all before the Indo-European invasion Europe was almost exclusively settled by middle eastern immigrants (and largely remained so in Southern Europe genetically).

No, I mean that North African client kingdoms and tribes, or the Roman themselves, would routinely trade in slaves and hire mercenaries or bring in merchants through the trans-Saharan trade routes.

>It’s not a stretch to imagine a lot of things but there is no evidence that was true to any significant degree (besides the demand for slaves in Roman Egypt was likely substantial enough to absorb most of the demand)

There literally is, as pointed out at the top of my comment. You can look it up.

[modo_mario]

They would be an oddity. That's often why one got reports of them. Because they were incredibly rare

Most of them like septimus severus you mention and the maurorum are north africans and then the historia augusta mentions a single black ethiopian. And it gets some weird amount of focus seemingly purely due to modern sensibilities in an anti racism drive and to create a sense of belonging. Same with how a lot of the story around the HMT windrush is wildly stretched or downright myth.

"It's not a stretch" .... "possibly manumitted later"....

Colonial era europe fairly certainly had many times more and outside of a few hotspots...they were still an oddity. They didn't just go back, didn't get selected out so that they didn't routinely show up in genepool research. They just aren't there in the demographic data. Fuck this is not that long ago. My great grandparents never saw one in the flesh.

[throwaway676712]

>And it gets some weird amount of focus seemingly purely due to modern sensibilities in an anti racism drive and to create a sense of belonging.

What does it say about people who relentlessly push back on it? It's not like people are arguing Rome had the same make up as the US. The thesis is fairly weak ("a small trickle of black people shows up because Rome was diverse and a unified empire that favors large scale population movements") and yet a large contingent of people seem intent on saying "no, not even that". I didn't mention anything about anti-racism drive, that's odd of you to bring it up.

>They didn't just go back, didn't get selected out so that they didn't routinely show up in genepool research. They just aren't there in the demographic data.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnfBYO53jhg

(Africans in Anglo-Saxon England)

[modo_mario]

>What does it say about people who relentlessly push back on it?

That they don't like it when you twist and manufacture history for idiological purposes.

>and yet a large contingent of people seem intent on saying "no, not even that". I didn't mention anything about anti-racism drive, that's odd of you to bring it up.

Because typically it is "no, not even that". You get idk how many zeroes behind the decimal marker to describe the percentages and yet they're always massively disporortionally there.

>I didn't mention anything about anti-racism drive, that's odd of you to bring it up.

Because so much of this extreme overrepresentation and twisting comes from american anti racism push and to give a sense of belonging in a eurocentric vision of history. Either that or engagement ragebait (see queen victoria was a black woman, cleopatra was a black woman type stuff). Movies about african slaver kingdoms, movies about british royalty, movies about medieval france, movies about greek mythos now, elves described as white as snow. It becomes impossible to not notice it everywhere.

And then we start seeing it outside of media like i mentioned with the HMS windrush stuff where suddenly the government and BBC starts entirely fabricating history seemingly to justify current migration policy. I pick this as an example because it's more known in the anglo world and is also much more recent and easily debunked but the same goes for random bits of colonial history for other european nations. It becomes so wild, pervasive and ever expanding in such a short period of time that you can't even call it out without sounding like a far right conspiracy nut all of a sudden. Even if you know it's the truth it makes you feel dirty pointing it out, like you're going against the crowd with some easily verifiable stuff. it's a red cloth for some including me.

The winners write history becomes so accutely clear. Except the winners aren't a party in an actual war and nobody reasonable wanted a culture war.

>>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnfBYO53jhg (Africans in Anglo-Saxon England)

So these skeletons had ancestors from sub saharan africa which could refer to a direct or tiered generational migration of very few individuals. It's that it's so extremely rare that makes us take note. Hell it's because it was so extremely rare that we can spot a lot of these differences in incomplete dna and skeletons to begin with.

There are also reports of very few chinese emisaries in the roman republic and similar asian showings. In Britain and italy there were some skeletons that were claimed to be of east asian origin with a more direct link.

I don't think we need this extreme overrepresentation to begin with but why are these people so rare in arthurian fiction, medieval and roman dramas. I don't suddenly see chinese or arabs in outlaw king or what have you. I see a much more contemporary makeup slanted towards the american one and then i see "people are arguing Rome had the same make up as the US." Constantly

[cauch]

Not sure if I should engage, but one thing just come to my mind in this discussion.

It looks like there is a huge imbalance between the "ideologically-driven intellectual dishonesty" contributions.

From the same author of the initial article (Bret Devereaux), there are more recent blog posts and even podcasts talks about what the author calls the "chuds", which are members of the public interested in history but who turn out to be ideologically motivated.

These groups have few characteristics that make them different from "normal amateurs": 1. they hate academics and confronting their views outside their bubble, 2. they have shallow knowledge (instead of "small localised deep knowledge" of normal amateurs), 3. they use their historical understanding "politically" (as opposed as someone who just enjoy understanding the past but does not go to the extra step to use it to support a future social ideal), 4. they are aggressive.

These characteristics should be independent of the political alignment: from this alone, there is no reason a right-wing chud has more probability to exist than a left-wing chud. And you easily expect the left-wing chud to have to same characteristics (because the origin of these characteristics is that these individuals first come to history with their ideological conclusions and acquire these characteristics when the reality or facts are contradicting these conclusions).

But what is interesting is that these chuds are overwhelmingly right-wing and pro-"how dare you say there were black Romans".

I'm sure that if you look long enough you may find left-wing and pro-"50% of blacks everywhere", but that is order of magnitude smaller (Devereaux points to Twitter account with huge following).

And I'm sure there are politically-correct mistakes. But it is not clear these mistakes are 100% ideological rather than the normal Gaussian curve (an intellectually honest person may sometimes underestimate, and may sometimes overestimate: the existence of overestimation examples does not mean it is the result of a problem). Or, even more interestingly, that these mistakes are due to the presence of right-wing chuds muddying the water (if you see a group that you know is unreliable defending some conclusions, you will be biased being more critical towards these conclusions, or you may "over correct" by swing of the pendulum).

So, I think it's a bit easy to just conclude: "That they don't like it when you twist and manufacture history for idiological purposes." to the question "What does it say about people who relentlessly push back on it?". A lot of people pushing back are not doing that because they don't like twisting and manufacturing history for ideological purposes, they are pushing back because they want to twist and manufacture history for their ideological purposes, and are angry if someone comes with something different (being for ideological purpose, from honest mistake, or even because it is the correct scientific approach).

I would agree with you if there were prominent left-wing chuds. But it's not the case, it looks like the pro-"presence of black romans" may sometimes get it wrong, but are less ideologically dominated than the anti-"presence of black romans".

(and to take back the example that started this specific thread: Elon Musk does not complain about The Odyssey because of respect for history. One of his prominent problem with the movie is that "the most beautiful woman" is black, which he judges as impossible historically but apparently, there are texts of this area praising the beauty of women that appear to be African. Musk's reaction is purely ideological: he does not know history, he does not care about it, he just saw something that was not particularly a-historical and concluded it was because he has a problem with "wokeness" and see it everywhere)