No, no it's literally not.

ἱστορία • (historíā) f (genitive ῐ̔στορῐ́ᾱς); first declension

From ῐ̔στορέω (historéō, “I inquire”), from ἵστωρ (hístōr, “one who knows, wise one”).

inquiry, examination, systematic observation, science body of knowledge obtained by systematic inquiry written account of such inquiries, narrative, history

Well, there's a lot. We don't know much about early Rome because there's not a great historiographical record left behind. We rely heavily on works written long after these events took place. People were writing, including those in Rome and those outside of it, but not all these writings survived into the modern day. Some of them may have been surpassed by later written works, some of them may have been a bit boring and just not enjoyed. We know that some of these works still existed when others were writing theirs, so they are maintained in that way (i.e. in fragments) But we run into a whole different set of complications when evaluating fragments.

Still, people in Rome during its heyday, and historians ever since, have done a good job at piecing together the little bits of information we do get to try and at least paint a picture of what was going on, even if there are still a lot of gaps, a lot of questions, and -- to a certain extent -- a lot of guesses.

I will also add that these things didn't just pop up from day one fully formed. No one's first ship was a tessarakonter. They would have started with some proto-ships, basically anything that could float, and overtime learn what makes the best floating stuff, perfect it, build upon it, etc.

Same with bridges, no one's building the Golden Gate on their first attempt. Early ones would have been very temporary, and quite even just "well we can walk across that spot that has a tree down, so why not just bring a tree down ourselves here?" Overtime you can learn to make them stronger, to bring more supplies over, to bring more people over, and eventually you might say "hey, we cross over this exact spot 7 times a week, but we're always replacing this wood, what else can we do here?"

While it would be mistaken to try and understand technology in a technology tree sort of way where it's all linear and constantly improving upon itself, especially in these prehistorical and ancient history societies, it might be okay to sorta imagine it like that if it helps gain a wider understanding. Better bridges required a better understanding of things like maths, physics, etc. Combining the understanding of building materials, purpose, arches, over time throughout many generations. The more a society grew, the more information they learnt, the better things could potentially be.

None of this is really surprising, nor anything we would expect to be unique to one culture -- therefore they can all come about independently and when you think about what a society needs to do to survive it's no surprise that they did.

Housing: need places to live safely, need a place live securely, need strong and easy to find materials. Rocks are abundant and hard. Pyramids are the easiest shape to build tall things. Start with a big foundation and build on top of it, and add less as you go up so there's less and less weight to support. Look actually here at the earlier pyramids in Egypt for great examples of what didn't work, they didn't start with the Great Pyramid, there was a lot of trial and error.

Food: You need food and materials to provide for a civilisation, the jump to agriculture is an early one for civilisation and not that surprising. Finding out how to ensure a regularly and steady food supply rather than just relying on nature to provide it. It also means you can stay in one place instead of constantly moving around throughout the year, and therefore be close to your protective dwellings at all times (even more reason to have one then too).

Societal factors: Religion comes as a result of the unknown, so we can't both expect that things would be unknown, and that religion appeared. It's a universal experience across civilisations. "Why is this happening? Why does the sun move each day? Why does thunder exist? What the hell is causing this flooding and why is it happening to us?"

Social Structures also exist in animals. Humans didn't invent the concept of leaders, and leaders will form naturally if a gap is present. You could take 10 fry-cooks from Maccas and drop them on an island, if they're going to survive someone is going to try to take charge (whether efficient or not). But if someone is efficient, and even good, people will be more likely to continue following them. And there comes in warfare. What if someone doesn't like that group, what if rival factions split up, what if a new party shows up and decides that they already have a leader and won't respect the way of things done on the island -- or have arrived with supplies that would be greatly useful? etc.

With war comes loot, you can destroy everything they have, or you can take it and benefit off of that. That includes humans. Humans can farm, humans can build, humans can even teach. We have use. So it's no surprise slavery is common.

Want a stronger system? Create markets, create a central place where you can sell your goods, and people can get them. It benefits everyone.

And then bridges, boats, irrigation, is just a natural extension. River in the way, but there's some good hunting grounds just beyond it? Well, we gotta get over that river. Back to our island buddies, fish may be the best supply they have, need to get in the water to get them? Or maybe to another nearby island? Boats. It's overcoming obstacles, ones that would have been obvious to the people. It's very much "if there's a will, there's a way" we recognise we need to get past this natural wall, how do we do it? Well...

What's obscure to one person won't be to another. What sort of topics have you already enjoyed?

How's your Italian?

I haven't read them, but I was curious if it was an academic vs casual deal as that's fairly common and you can usually tell with the publishers.

However, just looking them up quickly to check that I see one is subtitled "1776-1787" and the other "1789-1815" so while close in area, one seems to be a continuation of the other chronologically.

An American Historian might have to fact check me here, but 1776 to 87 would cover the American Revolution and the Articles of Confederation (the first US Constitution) up until around the Constitutional Convention in 1787 which set to revise the Articles (but in reality started writing the new Constitution) while the second book would begin in 1789 when the US Constitution (the one presently used) was put in effect up until the end of the war of 1812, a period which saw a lot of early ideas of US Government get tested and altered with experience -- such as the creation of a standing military. So both, in my mind, would show the reasons for how both constitutions were created, and how they evolved and discussions around them continued in each one's early years.

So unless those subtitles are very misleading, I imagine that's what Wood is doing there.

"Is it possible?" Sure, why not. But possible doesn't mean likely.

There's absolutely no way for a historian to answer what if questions. I've seen it best explained through an example of going to the grocery store.

Say you need groceries, you realise this at 7 o clock at night after getting home from a long day at work. You've got enough to last you til tomorrow, but not ideally. You could go to the store tonight, or you could wait until tomorrow. It's a scenario every adult has experienced.

So what happens if you go tonight, versus going tomorrow? In 99.9999% of the scenarios there's absolutely no difference maybe other than a bit of annoyance. But, for those small chances there are people that go out and get in a life changing car accident, or get food poisoning from stock that would have been replaced overnight, or run into an ex, or meet the person of their dreams in the queue, or a million different highly unlikely but entirely possible scenarios.

If you play that game for just ONE person it's highly unlikely that anything will change. But if you play that game with an entire population for hundreds of years, you're going to hit a lot of crazy odds.

So when we play the game of "what would happen if this entire group of people and this entire group of people combined with this entire group of people matched up differently..." we get into an absolutely unimaginable amount of scenarios and probabilities. Expand that over many generations and it's even more so. What if one of those people who would have been a great leader never existed because their parent died, etc. etc.

It may be fun to imagine, but there's no academic way of answering it. There is /r/HistoryWhatIf where they have a bit more fun with this, but again, take every answer with a dumptruck of salt.

"Bro, if you do that again I'm gonna shake your outfit"

"Bro, I'll shake your fucking outfit"

"I mean it bro, I'm gonna SHAKES"

"OH YOU WANNA? shakes"

Sport brawls are so fucking boring.

Historians don't pick "good guys" or "bad guys" in fact, we're trained to purposefully avoid doing that.

And we have a lot of evidence from the German side of WWII, you can buy Mein Kampf in many bookstores (some country's don't allow it, but it's easy enough to find if you do). Our archives are also full of Nazi Germany plans, journals, manuscripts, etc. We really couldn't ask for more when it comes to WWII.

As for how to do we identify propaganda? Well, that's a huge part of what historians do. We don't just look at a source and say "well it says here that.." we need to take what the source is arguing, and investigate it. We need to compare it with other works, we need to compare it with other sciences and approaches. We can then analyse the data and produce an argument with that evidence. It's a process, but it's why there's so much training and credentials that historians need to acquire and why there's systems in place to make sure historians have followed the proper steps and didn't get caught up or tricked.

Imperialism doesn't always require the actual taking or claiming of land. US Imperialism can include things like McDonalds and Starbucks on every street (cultural imperialism). It can include things like bringing a region of countries under your political control so they'll be more likely to support your wider positions in things like the UN (think the Cold War and the First and Second World countries). Throwing your weight around to expand your own personal power in the global world falls under this.

Of course this can absolutely be achieved directly through expansionism, colonialism, invasion, coups, etc. So there are wavelengths where these things do match up in some sort of evil Venn Diagram, but there are still distinct factors which can separate the concepts to keep them from being one-to-one synonyms.

If I were to put it as briefly as possible: Expansionism is the means, Imperialism is the effect that is had on the affected people, the culture, etc. and the benefits given to the driving-power after the fact.

A news agency reporting the news shouldn't be surprising. Hell, that's what we need more of.

"Napoleonic Era" includes the tail end of the Revolution and Napoleon as a whole.

"Revolutionary France" includes the Revolution and early stages of Napoleon.

There's enough overlap and short time frames in both regards that using either to date something wouldn't be blasphemous if it crawled into one or the other category a bit more than normal. And there's nothing wrong with applying both labels if something fits into both categories perfectly. "blah blah blah during Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era France.."

Yeah I've never heard of anyone having a topic for a PhD in History chosen for them. If someone has ended up in that situation they really didn't try hard to find a supervisor.

Typically how this works is you recognise an area where there is a gap, this is typically something that comes up during your MA research, or otherwise something you've been thinking of for a bit before then. You build up a good base knowledge of the historiography surrounding that topic, and then reach out to those working on or around that topic and see if they would be interested in supervising.

Sometimes it's an outright "sorry, no" for a variety of reasons, and usually there is some discussion and debate about how the project will go, "have you thought of this, have you read this, this has already been done but if you approach it from this angle then..." etc. but not outright "you do this project instead".

There are research projects that professors may be looking for help in that are specific, but that's not PhD level. I.e. "I need a summer researcher to go through these coins and look for x, y, z; build a database that filters a, b, c" or whatever. But that's a different area completely.

This is why reviewers of PhD theses (and sometimes MAs, it depends) are people outside of the department, outside of the university, and often anonymous. It's also why it's highly discouraged that people work at the same universities that they got their degrees at (although it's not unheard of). We don't care if you can make your supervisor happy. We don't care if you can repeat what your department head likes. We need to show that you can work with the wider academia, and that you can tread water in groups outside of your safety net.

My supervisors and I regularly disagreed on things. But it was my work, and they only stepped in to strongly discourage if they knew for a fact that I was wrong -- and could show it. If I had the evidence to back up my points that's what mattered in the long run.

There is no grand conspiracy to keep people all thinking the same way, it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of how academia works. If your idea has no basis in reality then yes, it's going to get shot down, but that doesn't mean that the department isn't open to new ideas, it's just that that idea sucks.

But they have to actually defend it, with evidence, through peer-reviewed works. They can't just say "ain't it slightly suspicious that.... therefore advanced race of early humans is obvious".

Two sides, usually more, are constantly arguing one way or the other, and as time goes on there are shifts, sometimes definitive ones. That's academia in a nutshell. It's fluid, it's constantly changing, but it has strict baseline requirements for evidence.

One that is commonly used for undergrads is: tell me when and where the trireme was invented. The ancient sources don't seem to agree, and the one that really comes out swinging is written long after the others. The archaeological evidence is a bit clearer, but still hard to say as ships don't tend to preserve well in the long-run. So throughout the 19th and 20th centuries historians were looking all the evidence they had and arguing one way or the other, all with some fantastic points of view and interpretations -- academia ENCOURAGES this. This is what we do.

But you do need evidence to back up your interpretation.

Uh, yes you do. Academia requires growth, it's a fundamental factor. There's not one area of History or Archaeology that there is 100% agreement on.

Every book I've ever been a part of (peer reviewed works) require a section at the start called a historiography. In this, I'm required to discuss the history of how different historians have approached and talked about the topic I'm writing on. This shows right away all the different arguments, all the different theories, and even the occassional academic fist fight. I then have to say "here's where this has brought us, here's what's right, and here's what everyone else is missing/got wrong... my work will now fill that gap by showing..." and then argue my point with my take on the evidence.

Grants, prizes, awards, are given to those that are the most groundbreaking. We regularly have books that shake up the entire system, it's part of the reason we do it, and we all want to be that person that does shake it up. It's a requirement of a PhD to complete original research that no one has done before. To do that you have to step on the toes of a lot of academics, living and dead.

Look at any academic journal, read through a couple of articles, you'll quickly see this to be the case.

You misunderstood him. He's saying he's not out to disprove Hancock because Hancock hasn't proved anything, you can't disprove evidence which isn't there. E.g. prove to me that unicorns never existed.

Instead, what he's done is gone through and discussed what's wrong with the logic that Hancock is using to come to his conclusions. i.e. here's what science have found, and none of it points to unicorns. When you thought A, you were forgetting B. When you said C, you were ignoring D.

It's a rational way to approach an irrational argument.

/r/HistoryWhatIf is what you're looking for :)

>When he says things like “they don’t want to accept this because it destroys their narrative.”

It always amuses me when people not working or experienced with academia say stuff like that. Like you say, all it takes is one look in any peer-reviewed journal to see that academia is people constantly trying to prove other academics wrong.

It's literally a requirement for PhDs in History and Archaeology (and some MAs depending on the programme) to create original research that hasn't been done before. Like you say, a huge new discovery of an ancient civilisation would be an academic's dream. I've gotten articles and several conference presentations out of analysing single words from obscure ancient texts. Just one artifact from some mysterious peoples would be career changing, let alone evidence of some massive ancient transglobal society.

I'm not intimately familiar with the population studies of these people, but can speak a bit on populations in antiquity.

The overwhelming majority of it is just educated guesses/estimates. Very rarely do we get anything that states actual populations, and even those that did have censuses should be taken with a grain of salt.

So what do we look at? We look at the cities themselves mainly. We know that cities need to be able to house people, feed people, provide water, etc. So if we're only getting evidence of enough houses for 20,000 people, water (piped in or otherwise) for 30,000 people, etc. then we can start to doubt some of the higher limits.

However, we also can't just assume things were perfect either. We can't assume every room was a bedroom for one person. We can't assume that the amount of water would have been given to one person and used up (no excess) or that the amount of water was enough to give the right amount to all the people there (inadequate).

And so on and so forth. That is all to say that the reason we get such wide swings in population estimates is because different people are looking at different criteria and analysising them differently too. Some people may be very conservative, and go for the lowest, some may be a bit more open and go for the highest possible number.

So who's right? We usually will never know. Same thing happens with army sizes, with a lot of guesses -- though in antiquity this tends to go towards over-exaggerating rather than under, though there's probably a few instances of that happening too. Additionally, it's a common mistake to think that all members of an army lived in said place. Mercenaries were far more common than most people think, and this is fairly universal across antiquity.

/This is by no means describing the whole problem/study, there's a lot more factors to take into account, more areas of evidence we can look at (burials are fun), but just a very quick introduction.

You get them in antiquity. Off the top of my head, the Romans had the Nero redivivus theories that claimed that Nero was still alive and would come back to rule Rome. This actually had some impact, as we got what we call Pseudo-Nero(s) who would show up and claim to be Nero, and some of them would get some sizable followings.

With less mythology attached, we get a lot of Pretenders who claim to be so and so's lost son, and try and seize thrones. One of the more infamous cases from antiquity was the case of Pseudo-Philip, or Andriscus, who claimed to be Philip VI of Macedon and was the direct cause of the Fourth Macedonian War.

Then you have incidents like the mutilation of the hermae and the mimicry of the Mysteries in fifth century Athens which caused a lot of conspiracy theories and a lot of witch hunts. Everything from the Spartans, or some other group, having secretly invaded, to either pro-democracy, or anti-democracy political factions sending a message, to named individuals of importance directly causing these events (something that Alcibiades was greatly affected by).

Or stories that the Carthaginians were conspiring with the Persians because two famous battles seemed to have happened on the same day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Himera_(480_BC)

When you mix in a lot of emotion, a lack of verifiable information, and a period where gossip could spread without much fact checking or wholly reliable news sources, you get a lot of things like this.

It's fairly complicated, but here's a good rundown of the issues here https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jhahz/who_is_the_first_historically_verifiable_pope_of/

It's much easier to tell people apart with search engines and even library cataloguing systems. These names tend not to come during the lifetime of the person, but usually long after, and often from different places. "They had that king Karl, which Karl? The one that was a tyrant." "Ah, right" "Alexander did" "Which Alexander?" "Phillip's son" "that really doesn't narrow it down." "The great one" "oh, right"

The other side are names that come up because of propaganda, especially attempts to bolster an image or to diminish a reputation after the person has died. These are more popular within that country, and usually more close to said person's lifetime. Think "Dubya" in America for GWB. The name is unlikely to be understood by most 100 years from now, and even most children today might not understand the reference, but people of a certain age will mostly pick up what you mean relatively easily. But again, there's usually a short shelf life for these things because it's a biased term, and it's not going to show up in reference guides, encyclopedias, or official histories (at least not as one of the main important things to know about this person so it will eventually boil down to a neat bit of pub trivia or something the professional scholars of that invidual know, but won't be common outside of that small circle.

That comes in part with a rise in standards of professional academia and publishing. It was not uncommon to publish direct attacks against politicians, leaders, etc. with names of all sorts. King George "The Royal Brute" or other such "wicked tyrants". These types of publishings would be distributed as pamphlets and the like, and they could even gain popularity outside of the country it was intended for. So names might stick that way, but again, only so long as the people around to have read and remembered -- and cared passionately enough about the subject.

It would kinda be like if we named our current politicians off of names people on Facebook gave them -- but we don't, and for good reason.

Instead, these days, if you want to learn about events happening under one politician you're likely going to encounter peer-reviewed or tightly policed systems online in the forms of Wikipedia, news articles, published books, etc. More people are going to become instantly familiar with the individuals by their birth names, and instantly familiar with their role in whatever conflict. These may still need to nicknames being created (and if you search in the right places there are plenty for modern politicians), but they won't be enough to drown out all the other more polished publishings.

"Checkmate" comes from Persian

>شاه مات‎ (šâh mât, “the king [is] amazed”). Perhaps conflated with Arabic مَاتَ‎ (māta, “to die”).

The origins of the game itself are a bit blurrier, but not four thousand years old blurry. But, there were games four thousand years old that if we went back in time and saw people playing we would probably describe them as "like chess" as they had similar elements.

There's a lot of games from antiquity that we would recognise or be somewhat familiar with, and probably pick up the rules of relatively quickly. https://www.joshobrouwers.com/articles/ancient-greek-heroes-play/