History Buffs: Time of Alexander

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

The Etruscans would still be a force for some time. Even during the second Punic war there was some concern that the Etruscans would rise again.

The Greek colonies in Sicily would be doing very very well during this period.

There would be Celtic groups everywhere. At some point there is even a Celtic culture in Asia Minor though I don't know if they enter before or after this period.

If I remember my military history accurately India would be big into foot archers during this period. There might still be chariots and there were a comparatively large amount of elephants. They had trouble getting good horses, but I'm certain this was less true on the Easter edge.

While Alexander didn't have that huge an influence on India there were some elements of Greek culture that got distributed into the sub-continent. Art historians believe that Indian 'twisty' sculptor is an innovation resulting from contact with the Greeks.

 

[Dragonblade]

Not much is known about the pre-mongoloid culture that ruled in Japan before the second or third century AD.

There is a period called the Jomon period that occurs before the first mongoloid tribes invaded Japan.

I believe there were several different peoples populating different parts of Japan, especially the Ainu in the north. A people more like Native Americans or even "white" Europeans than they were to the Chinese and other Asian cultures.

They were generally displaced or completely absorbed into the culture of their conquerors. War-like mongoloid tribes that eventually became the people we think of as Japanese and Korean today.

It was this Mongoloid race that conquered most of Japan throughout the early 2-4th century AD that gave rise to the feudal "samurai" style culture we are all familiar with. Although the samurai as we popularly know them didn't really exist until something like the 12th century and only lasted until the 16th after Tokugawa united Japan under one government and did his best to get rid of the samurai. A warrior class is a threat to a government that wants to rule in peace.

My Japanese history is a little hazy so someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[Agback]

At some point there is even a Celtic culture in Asia Minor though I don't know if they enter before or after this period.

The Galatians. They did't put in an appearance until a bit later: they crossed the Hellepont in 278 BC and were turned back from Pergammon in 239. Only after that did they settle down (and became a Roman colony in 25 BC).

Regards,


Agback

 

[Buttercup]

Dunno if it would help you, but The Man Who Would Be King by Rudyard Kipling is about two British soldiers who find an isolated country that worships Alexander as a god and awaits his return. It was made into a movie starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery. Of course it isn't remotely historical, but it has a mythic feel and there is a bunch of treasure. It's good to mine for plots, IMO.

Also, I found a pretty good website with info on Alexander here. And a page of maps here.

 

[Buttercup]

The Galatians. They did't put in an appearance until a bit later: they crossed the Hellepont in 278 BC and were turned back from Pergammon in 239. Only after that did they settle down (and became a Roman colony in 25 BC).

Agback, I always look forward to your posts on matters historical. My thought process goes like this: Oh! A history thread. I bet Agback will post some interesting stuff. I had better go read it.

I'd like you to just do a core dump, and tell us everything you know. Based on what I've seen, it would take about 10 years.

If you didn't live on the other side of the world, I'd invite you to dinner so we could have interesting conversations about history.

 

[krichaiushii]

other sources

More ancient history information can be found at

www.julen.net/aw/

certainly more than I could hope to know and tell you. The book Timetables of History provides year-by-year comparative timelines for known historical events, starting in 5000 BC and running to 1990 (my copy, at least). Fascinating reading.

Enjoy.

 

[Samnell]

I found a book that's a great way to get a bird's eye view of the classical world. "A Guide to the Ancient World" by Michael Grant.

It's sort of a dictionary of classical place names. The sucker's about seven hundred pages and comes with a few nice maps. You can just look up a place and get a quick overview of how it fared from the dawn of the Greek polis to the fall of Rome in the West. You can pull a lot of history of a given period together from reading and correlating a few entries timewise. I think my favorite is how the Hellenized Bactrian states got cut off from the West by a renewed Persian empire and the position it put them in.

 

[Agback]

If you didn't live on the other side of the world, I'd invite you to dinner so we could have interesting conversations about history.

What part of Florin do you live in? I will be visiting the West Coast in September, and I'm looking for someone to commiserate with my over the exchange rate of the Australian dollar. Every dinner will be a welcome cash saving, quite aside from the pleasure of meeting the Florinese other than as tourists.

Regards,


Agback

 

[Buttercup]

What part of Florin do you live in? I will be visiting the West Coast in September, and I'm looking for someone to commiserate with my over the exchange rate of the Australian dollar.

Sadly, the part of Florin I live in is about 2000 miles from the West Coast, roughly equidistant from Lakes Michigan and Erie.

 

[Corey]

Ashoka ruled 268-233 BC. He killed something like 100 siblings for the throne. Later, horrified by the bloody conquest of Kalinga, he embraced Buddhism and become one of its greatest advocates. His great-grandfather Chandragupta Maurya founded the Mauryan Empire in 321BC.

My quick reference book lists late Jomon hunter-gathers in Japan. I have no clue about them. South-east Asia appears to be simple farming societies and gives Thais, Burmese, and Pyu peoples.

Carthage was going strong in the western Mediterranean; the Celts dominated central and western Europe. I believe there were still Greek city-states in southern France

Rome was a major power in Italy. The Romans knocked out the Etruscans and Latins a few decades earlier.

In China the Qin state was the most powerful.

My home-brew is based on post-successor war Afghanistan, so I have decent amount of material about the time period in that region on my hard drive. I’d be happy to e-mail some of it to you, e-mail me at cpsaylor@yahoo.com

One good book is John Haywood’s Historical Atlas of the Classical World. It gives a very handy big picture and it has a map of the world in 323BC.