192 replies to this topic

[mohistManiac]

Usually people measure the rate of urbanization by counting nucleated settlements above a certain threshold. Usually scholars used 1,000 inhabitants, 5,000 inhabitants or 10,000 inhabitants. The Census of the US used 8,000 inhabitants, 4,000 inhabitatns and 2,500 inhabitants, as cut off points for their statistic of the rate of urbanization of the US.

The different values used around the globe in determining the rate of urbanization simply exhibits the reality of the variability of urbanization. Places like the US would probably use quite a few sets of numbers as would any place whose economic development is not uniform. Probably in some places of the US the cut off point would be an average town size of less than 500 members.

The rate of urbanization can be used as a proxy for economic development. As the higher the rate of urbanization, the higher the proportion of the population not engaged directly in agriculture and the higher the degree of mercantilization of the economy and the proportion of the workforce engaged in the service and manufacturing sectors. There has been shown a very high correlation between urbanization and per capita income in modern countries:

But what if it depends on the kind of market reach your agricultural product had. Wheat wasn't a luxury item but it was cheap enough to get the job done through the concept of food dole. People flocked to the Roman cities thereby enlivening their other more lucrative trade aspects. However sometimes, as in the case with China, use of agriculture could provide economic growth factor simply because of the market reach. Since silk itself reached Rome the demand must have somehow been echoed back in much greater quantity. What might have first appeared as a loose stretch of underpopulated villages might have later on formed an expansive cluster with numerous nucleated centers and intensely connected to furthering urbanization and economic growth. Han dynasty for example were able to develop economically because they were replacing the high volume materials required for themselves using cheaper alternatives like paper to replace silk and allowing the newly made silk surplus to be traded as an luxury item.

[Tibet Libre]

Still the Classical Greeks had more advanced science than the previsouly cited societies, but were primitive, technology wise.

Can't disagree more. Some Greek technological inventions which spring to my mind are

- screws
- gears
- differential gear
- waterwheels (undershot and overshot)
- watermills
- waterlifting devices such as sakia, noria, waterscrews and various kinds of pumps
- windwheel
- (primitive) steam engine
- underfloor heating
- rams
- catapults
- chain-link
- spritsails
- dry docks
- three-masted ship
- automaton
- camshaft
- organ
- keyboard instruments
- silver and gold coinage
- theatres (both the art form and the structure)
- crossbow
- wheelbarrow
- tunnels excavated from opposite ends
- lighthouses
- shipsheds
- ship trackways
- inflow waterclocks
- dial and pointer
- escapement
- parchment
- crane
- winch
- showers
- odometer
- canal lock
- gimbal
- mosaic (tesserae)
- high-relief
- etc. etc. etc.

The only reason I can imagine why you have overlooked the tremendous contribution of Greece to the history of technology is its even larger achievement in the sciences.

[Tibet Libre]

But I don't believe technology needs to be measured based on how it was available to the general public.

What criteria do you then propose for the general standard of living? If we were going by rare 'peak' technologies instead, ancient societies would appear more advanced than they actually were. We have evidence of very advanced technology such as steam engines, windmills, differential gears, railways and pneumatic catapults used by the Greeks, but these were as far as we know isolated occurrences not representative of the general standard of technology. Aqueducts feeding 600 Roman cities count in my book a lot more than a singulary reference to a steam engine when determining the general standard of civilization.

[kama]

What criteria do you then propose for the general standard of living? If we were going by rare 'peak' technologies instead, ancient societies would appear more advanced than they actually were. We have evidence of very advanced technology such as steam engines, windmills, differential gears, railways and pneumatic catapults used by the Greeks, but these were as far as we know isolated occurrences not representative of the general standard of technology.

I don't think he made any criteria, he was actually telling you to stop the double standard.
Half of the technology you brought out are not available for the general public. So your own standards contradict you.

Aqueducts feeding 600 Roman cities count in my book a lot more than a singulary reference to a steam engine when determining the general standard of civilization.

The population in these cities are still the vast minority of the population of the entire empire, which WAS the point. In another word, all those technologies you mentioned do not apply to most people.

The 5% figure was the estimated rate of urbanization of Europe and China during the Middle Ages, according to this:

It is also the estimate given by Angus Maddison for the Roman Empire in his "The World Economy: a millenial
perspective". Honestly speaking, the urbanization rate for the Roman Empire is very difficult to estimate, but whether or not 5 percent is the right figure is really irrelevant, the point was that the urbanized poplation made up the vast minority of the total population and therefore, most of these Roman inventions Tibet Liber threw around ARE NOT AVAILABLE to the general population.

Marxism is not only a theory, it is pretty much a dead theory, since it's economic foundations were decisively refuted already in the 1890's by Böhn-Bawerk. Why Marxism persists? Well, because Marxism is really a religion among some social scientists. The mechanical model where society progresses from slavery, to serfdom, to capitalism to socialism is ridiculous when one thinks about it. It is also based on western history, from the ancients to the modern times, but western history is not a history of constant progress, but of periods of progress, like the period from 800 BCE to 100 CE, and periods of decline and collapse, like from 100 CE to 700 CE. We can even consider the civilization of the ancient Graeco-Romans to be a distinct civilization from modern European civilization. Modern Western civilization emerged from the ruins of the ancients.

Marxist economic history is not dead; it is very much alive and is the dominant theory in China right now. Even in the west there are still Marxist theorists and they do have a heavy influence on economic history in general.

These facts are a rought indicator of the engineering capabilities of a society. They don't mean anything directly, like the fact that the US put the men on the moon while Nigeria didn't doest necessarily mean that the US has better living standards than Nigeria. Japan and Germany don't have living standards significantly inferior to the USA's, but they didn't put the men on the moon.

You should tell that to Tibet Libre, which was who he addressd it to.

Edited by kama, 23 July 2011 - 11:21 PM.

[Guaporense]

One thing to note about comparing Han with Rome is that the Roman Empire under the principate was the most advanced western state before modern times. Today we are accustumed to think that technology and living standards always improve with time, but that's not true. 1st century Roman technology and living standards were only surpassed in the west by the 19th century, according to modern archaeological data and theoretical research. So if Han China was more advanced than the Roman Empire, so later dynasties such as Song and Ming were even more advanced, so China was hugely more advanced than Europe for 1800 years of the last 2000 years. I think that's too much of a stretch.

I guess that China was more advanced than the West (which refers to Europe, North Africa and Western Asia, which includes syria, judea and asia minor) from 400 CE to 1400 CE. A period of 1 thousand years.

I have made this graph illustrating the rise and fall of classical civilization and the long term trend of China and the West. Both show a tendency for advancement over the very long term, but with huge discontinuities and in the case of the west, a 2,000 year long cycle:



The rise of the ancient west was a very fast and dramatic process in long run historical terms. This is revelead in the following archaeological data:

1 - Size of the houses. Houses escavated in the 9-8th centuries BCE in Italy and Greece are very small and very simple hut like structures. By the 1st century CE the typical Roman house was larger than the modern American house (though the number of inhabitants per house in Roman times was much greater so the per capita housing space was smaller, but it's large, probably around 400-500 square feet per capita). Per capita housing space increased about 10 fold in Italy and Greece from 800 BCE to 1 CE.

2 - Quality of the houses and the number of things found inside the houses. Houses in the 8-9th centuries BCE were made of simple materials such as wood and dirt. Houses of the 1st century were typicaly made of brick, mortar and plaster. The number of metal utensils found in Graeco-Roman houses also increased hugely, Ian Morris guess a probable 10 times increase in per capita supply of utensils, furniture and other household stuff.

A hut, typical residence of pre-classical peoples and the tribes around the empire:


Remains of a wall in Pompeii:


Clearly there was a huge difference in living standards between Pompeii and the tribes around the Roman Empire. Pompeii was build with almost modern technology while celtic villages were made of pieces of wood and stone found in the forest. The average pompeian had 10-15 times the housing space of the average celtic village dweller. It is untrue to claim that living standards were similar in all pre-industrial societies.

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire was not just the decline and fall of an empire, but it was the collapse of an entire civilization. By the year 700, almost nothing remained of civilized living standards in Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. Some regions such as Syria and Egypt held out better than others and still preserved some rudiments of civilization but the overall picture was terrible. This is reflected in the archaeological remains, we have much more buildings and shipwrecks and levels of lead and copper pollution from the early roman times as compared to the early middle ages. The shipwreck data is the most impressive:



It is also strongly correlated with other indicators, from levels of lead pollution in Greeland ice cores to the number of dated building inscriptions.

The shipwreck data also underestimates the rise and fall of long distance trade during ancient and medieval times. Roman ships were several times larger and safer than medieval ships, so they tended to get wrecked less often. It is like measuring the size of the US car fleet by counting car accidents, today the US car fleet is over 20 times larger than it was in 1920, but the number of car accident related deaths didn't increase by 20 times, as cars got safer.

Roman sea trade was in the order of several millions of tons. Only equalled in very recent times, for comparison Longon in 1800 CE moved 800,000 tons of cargo, while Rome imported 400,000 tons of wheat alone in the 1st century, Rome's 1st century port probably moved a larger volume of cargo than London's in 1800 CE.

For China my graph shows a gradual rise for nearly 2,000 years, with minor declines such as the fall of Han, since we don't have anything like what happened in the fall of the roman empire for sinitic civilization. The mongol invasions created a decline, but it was reverted and the level of civilization in 14th century China wasn't much worse off as compared to the 11th century. Chinese levels of metal production show such rise and levels of per capita iron production during the Song were higher than during the early 19th century. So I put the Song as the zenith of pre-modern Chinese social complexity.

Edited by Guaporense, 24 July 2011 - 06:10 PM.

[Guaporense]

My favorite example of data reflecting changing living standards in antiquity is the median size of excavated houses in Greece (it shows the median because there were some palaces as well that distorted the average):



It shows the rise and fall of bronze age Greek civilization, with declining living standards from the time of the Illiad, 13th century BCE to the Greek dark ages in the 10-9th centuries BCE.

The median house plan size increased from 43 square meters in the 9th century BCE to 230 square meters in the 4th century BCE, the golden age of classical Greece, the times of Aristotle and Alexander. Since estimated 50% of houses got second floors by the 4th century BCE while none had second floors in the 9th century, the median actual roofed size of the house increased 8-9 times. By the 4th century the typical Greek lived in a larger home than the typical American today (but the per capita housing space was lower as the typical household size was larger in classical Greece).

The sample size is too small for the 11th and 10th centuries BCE producing some big average house sizes, se we must see that in this case we are in the dark about actual median house size. The smaller sample size is also an indicator of smaller volume of construction, the product of the dark ages.

Classical Greece was exceptional in many ways. According to the estimates in the book the Shotgun Method in the 4th century BCE the region of Boeotia had around 200,000 inhabitants (estimates vary from 250,000 to 165,000), as compared to 42,000 inhabitants in the 1889 census and in 2005 the same region has 135,768 inhabitants. Classical Greece had regions with higher population densities than at any point in history and usually with 5-10 times the population densities of medieval and pre-classical times. Field surveys showed that population density in classical Greece increased 10-15 times from 800 BCE to 350 BCE and never reached the same level again until the 20th century, or in the case of some regions, even today the density is smaller.

Also, hellenistic Greeks were taller than Greeks from the 1960's:

Geoffrey Kron also showed using larger sample sizes the average height of 172.0 centimeters for hellenistic Greeks, similar to the 171.8 centimeters data in this picture.

Still they were 4 centimeters away from modern Britons, but northern Europeans tend to be naturally taller.

[kama]

One thing to note about comparing Han with Rome is that the Roman Empire under the principate was the most advanced western state before modern times. Today we are accustumed to think that technology and living standards always improve with time, but that's not true. 1st century Roman technology and living standards were only surpassed in the west by the 19th century, according to modern archaeological data and theoretical research. So if Han China was more advanced than the Roman Empire, so later dynasties such as Song and Ming were even more advanced, so China was hugely more advanced than Europe for 1800 years of the last 2000 years. I think that's too much of a stretch.

Nobody stated that Han was superior to the Roman Empire. Where did you get that idea from? On the contrast, people like Tibet Libre has been making one sided claims that the Roman Empire is definitely more sophisticated than the Han. However its clear that both had their advances in different fields and I really wonder how anyone could possibily quantify social complexity the way you are doing. For one, we do not know enough of ancient societies to make such graphs plausible. And second, the criteria one uses to measure complexity is largely subjective. While Medieval China has surpassed Europe in most quadrants, the comparison between Rome and China is far more difficult to make as both had areas which surpassed the other. In the area of bureaucratic complexity, population control, metallurgy, agricultural labor and irrigation for example, the Han was much more sophisticated than Rome.

1st century Roman technology and living standards were only surpassed in the west by the 19th century, according to modern archaeological data and theoretical research.

Thats debatable, and Angus Maddison seem to suggest that European living standards already surpassed that of ancient Roman ones by the 13th century. If living standards is how you use to gauge sophistication, then the question is far from clear. We've already had a topic on living standards between Rome and Han here: http://www.chinahist...rope-and-china/

The rise of the ancient west was a very fast and dramatic process in long run historical terms. This is revelead in the following archaeological data:

1 - Size of the houses. Houses escavated in the 9-8th centuries BCE in Italy and Greece are very small and very simple hut like structures. By the 1st century CE the typical Roman house was larger than the modern American house (though the number of inhabitants per house in Roman times was much greater so the per capita housing space was smaller, but it's large, probably around 400-500 square feet per capita). Per capita housing space increased about 10 fold in Italy and Greece from 800 BCE to 1 CE.

2 - Quality of the houses and the number of things found inside the houses. Houses in the 8-9th centuries BCE were made of simple materials such as wood and dirt. Houses of the 1st century were typicaly made of brick, mortar and plaster. The number of metal utensils found in Graeco-Roman houses also increased hugely, Ian Morris guess a probable 10 times increase in per capita supply of utensils, furniture and other household stuff

.

What is a "typical Roman house", is it an Urban dwelling or does it include rural huts? The chances are, most excavated houses were Urban preservations, and hence the sample itself was selective to begin with. As Angus Maddison pointed out, most rural peasants anywhere on earth lived in similar living standards.

Chinese levels of metal production show such rise and levels of per capita iron production during the Song were higher than during the early 19th century. So I put the Song as the zenith of pre-modern Chinese social complexity.

Ming metal production was actually much greater than those of the Song. And seriously, metal production is not the criteria to gauge social complexity or China would indeed have led the world since the Han because of its superior iron production.

[mohistManiac]

One thing to note about comparing Han with Rome is that the Roman Empire under the principate was the most advanced western state before modern times. Today we are accustumed to think that technology and living standards always improve with time, but that's not true. 1st century Roman technology and living standards were only surpassed in the west by the 19th century, according to modern archaeological data and theoretical research. So if Han China was more advanced than the Roman Empire, so later dynasties such as Song and Ming were even more advanced, so China was hugely more advanced than Europe for 1800 years of the last 2000 years. I think that's too much of a stretch.

China during Han only needs to have a slight lead over the Roman Empire and continue with steady improvement in applications for their technology to simply maintain a lead. The imagined gap doesn't have to be so severe that it defies reason.

I have made this graph illustrating the rise and fall of classical civilization and the long term trend of China and the West. Both show a tendency for advancement over the very long term, but with huge discontinuities and in the case of the west, a 2,000 year long cycle:

It's a stating about social complexity which needs to be considered apart from technological improvements and living standards. For example social complexity may allow the emperor to direct large working forces to work on a canal without micromanaging them as slaves. However canals are not necessarily accessed by all parts of the population but it may indirectly raise the living standards of everyone due to higher frequency trade.

The rise of the ancient west was a very fast and dramatic process in long run historical terms. This is revelead in the following archaeological data:

1 - Size of the houses. Houses escavated in the 9-8th centuries BCE in Italy and Greece are very small and very simple hut like structures. By the 1st century CE the typical Roman house was larger than the modern American house (though the number of inhabitants per house in Roman times was much greater so the per capita housing space was smaller, but it's large, probably around 400-500 square feet per capita). Per capita housing space increased about 10 fold in Italy and Greece from 800 BCE to 1 CE.

2 - Quality of the houses and the number of things found inside the houses. Houses in the 8-9th centuries BCE were made of simple materials such as wood and dirt. Houses of the 1st century were typicaly made of brick, mortar and plaster. The number of metal utensils found in Graeco-Roman houses also increased hugely, Ian Morris guess a probable 10 times increase in per capita supply of utensils, furniture and other household stuff.

A house that gets bigger doesn't necessarily equate to higher living standard because it is the house that gets the redirected monies and raw materials without necessarily creating a profile for the owners that live inside. The larger space it occupies may allow for more renting people to gather providing for more social complexity but a ten times bigger house just isn't a systematic way of saying that there is a whole lot more living standard that are inherent in the civilization not found in any other.

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire was not just the decline and fall of an empire, but it was the collapse of an entire civilization. By the year 700, almost nothing remained of civilized living standards in Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. Some regions such as Syria and Egypt held out better than others and still preserved some rudiments of civilization but the overall picture was terrible. This is reflected in the archaeological remains, we have much more buildings and shipwrecks and levels of lead and copper pollution from the early roman times as compared to the early middle ages. The shipwreck data is the most impressive:

Indoor plumbing was specific to Rome as were its aqueducts. However if another civilization was equally obsessed about cleanliness, sanitation procedures, and related health concerns without going heavily into copper mining would you not also mark it with the same stamp of high living standard? Also I'm not sure what is meant by the shipwrecked data. Wouldn't the significantly higher shipwrecks make a case of some naval battle that was going on at the time than for a suggestion of the number of ships or how faulty they were?

Edited by mohistManiac, 24 July 2011 - 09:29 PM.

[Shiang]

What criteria do you then propose for the general standard of living? If we were going by rare 'peak' technologies instead, ancient societies would appear more advanced than they actually were. We have evidence of very advanced technology such as steam engines, windmills, differential gears, railways and pneumatic catapults used by the Greeks, but these were as far as we know isolated occurrences not representative of the general standard of technology. Aqueducts feeding 600 Roman cities count in my book a lot more than a singulary reference to a steam engine when determining the general standard of civilization.

Shang dynasty Chinese bronze production dwarfed contemporaneous production of Bronze in Europe. Hundreds of bronze vessels were found at lady Fu Hao's tomb at Yinxu. She lived about 1200 BC.

the only contemporaneous civilizations in europe at the time was greece in mycenae, whose bronze production came no where near the thousands of bronze ding vessels

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Ding_(vessel)

During the Qin dynasty, before the Han dynasty, Chinese coated the surfaces of Bronze swords and other weapons in the terra cotta army with chromium, over 2,200 years before Europeans discovered chrocmium in the 1700s, and even then, they didn't use it to do anything constructive, not until 1924

the bronze Sword of Goujian was found in perfectly preserved conditions after over 2,300 years.

in 500 BC chinese metalworkers developed blast steel furnaces in the Wu states in southeastern China, beating europeans by over 1,500 years.

"A history of Chinese civilization" By Jacques Gernet states on pages 69 and 140

on page 69-

People have been suprised at China's 'lead' in the realm of iron and steel technology:, the chinese were cpable of producing steel in the first to second centuries A.D., whereas the first successful attempts at casting iron were not made in Europe until the end of the middle ages , and steel came later still. the difference in the time-scale, which reveals not so much a lead or backwardness as the originality of the technological tradition of different civilizations, is sufficiently explained by the experience acquired in the Chinese world in the casting of bronze (it was the lack of copper and tin that first caused the switch to iron), and by the perfecting of bellows at the time of the warring states. However, it seems that is was not until later, under the Han rulers, that the double action piston bellows made its appearance.

on page 140

Chinese could produce steel as early as the second century A.D. by heating and working together irons with different carbon contents. As early as this time steel weapons replaced bronze weapons..... Swords, halbreds, and crossbow mechanisms of the Han age found in the course of excavations are made of iron. The evidence of Pliny the Elder, who praises the quality of the iron produced by the Seres, corraborates the allusions in Chinese texts to clandestine exports of iron and to the diffusion of the iron and steel technology of the Han age in the oases of Central Asia.

page 28-

Shang bronzes from the end of the second millenium B.C. are the finest ever produced, ; the production of cast iron had become a big Chiense industry by the fourth centutry B.C.;, and chinese smelters succeeded in regularly producing steel some centuries later....China was the land of the most skilled mettallurgists.

[nicopolo]

Thanks first for the most illuminating information I got from this topic.
I am interested in "Connections", peculiar similarities, between the history of Roma and China.
I would appreciate if you could help me further.
My major interest is in people, events, habits, geography ... these are few examples:
- Both civilizations started on a Yellow River, Huanghe and Biondo Tevere
- The unification of the Chinese empire and the unification of Italy happened at the same time (221 BC and 202 BC respectively) after centuries of "Warring states"
- Wang Mang and Caesar usurped power for 15 years around the same time (9-23AD and 59-44 BC respectively)
- The Han empire and the High Roman Empire were followed around the same time (220 AD and 284 AD) by decades of divisions (three kindoms and Tetrarchy respectively)
- Confucianism and Mos Majorum (the moral philosophy of Ancient Romans have aspects in common)
- Legalism and Ius Romanus (Roman law) are common aspects of state ideology
I would like to engage both in serious deep topics and light anecdotes.
Thanks in advance for your contributions.

[Hooly]

Thanks first for the most illuminating information I got from this topic.
I am interested in "Connections", peculiar similarities, between the history of Roma and China.
I would appreciate if you could help me further.
My major interest is in people, events, habits, geography ... these are few examples:
- Both civilizations started on a Yellow River, Huanghe and Biondo Tevere
- The unification of the Chinese empire and the unification of Italy happened at the same time (221 BC and 202 BC respectively) after centuries of "Warring states"
- Wang Mang and Caesar usurped power for 15 years around the same time (9-23AD and 59-44 BC respectively)
- The Han empire and the High Roman Empire were followed around the same time (220 AD and 284 AD) by decades of divisions (three kindoms and Tetrarchy respectively)
- Confucianism and Mos Majorum (the moral philosophy of Ancient Romans have aspects in common)
- Legalism and Ius Romanus (Roman law) are common aspects of state ideology
I would like to engage both in serious deep topics and light anecdotes.
Thanks in advance for your contributions.

nicopolo,

With all due respect, your comparisons are rather shallow. Instead of China, you can compare Rome to a variety of ancient states and civilizations. If you want affinity, then Rome is a Hellenistic civilization being most closely resembling the Ancient Greeks, from gov't organization, to military tactics, to religion. And Rome is a sub-set of a civilization, namely 'The West' while China is a civilization unto itself, resembling no other. You're comparing apples and oranges I'm afraid. Where you see similarities, I see differences. Take the Warring States example for instance, in China it was caused by the breakdown of the Zhou feudal system, all the Chinese states ultimately having their origins in the feudal system of the Zhou, a unified polity and civilizational entity. In Italy, Rome was neighbors with related, but different polities, ranging from the hill country Samnites (who did not fight in phalanx formation), to the enigmatic Etruscans (who weren't even Indo-European) to the Greek polis' in Magna Graecia. Rome's 'unification' of Italy was more conquest than uniting frankly.

And origin theory, .. yes Chinese civilization had its origins on the Yellow River, but Rome, and indeed all 'The West', has its origins ultimately on the banks of the Nile and Tigris/Euphrates rivers.

Usurpers ... many states, kingdoms and empires experience usurpations of some sort, its the nature of pre-modern and some modern societies.

The breakdown of the Chinese and Roman worlds during the Three Kingdoms and the Tetrachy are nothing alike, ... the Three Kingdoms was a more a partition of the Han dynasty, ... the Tetrarchy was ordered by the emperor Diocletian to better handle a bloated empire.

Both Confucianism and Legalism (and other philosophies) were products of the Hundred Schools of Thought Movement, a reaction and attempted remedy to, the breakdown of the Zhou world. It was a unique phenomenon to China and its circumstances, very different from, say, the Hebrews, who would pray to their God and ask for a savior and messiah, ... or the Romans who really had no remedy, other than Constantine converting to an alien religion, and basically giving up to the Germanic barbarians. Modern historians call this 'The Fall of Rome' and the Dark Ages, .. Rome of the Republic, of the victory over Hannibal, of Jupiter, of the Caesars, of Cicero, and Sulla has basically died so that the nations of the Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Goths, etc, could be born. The China of Confucius, Shang Yang, Lao Tze (but not Mo Tze) is still with us in the modern world.

[mohistManiac]

Take the Warring States example for instance, in China it was caused by the breakdown of the Zhou feudal system, all the Chinese states ultimately having their origins in the feudal system of the Zhou, a unified polity and civilizational entity. In Italy, Rome was neighbors with related, but different polities, ranging from the hill country Samnites (who did not fight in phalanx formation), to the enigmatic Etruscans (who weren't even Indo-European) to the Greek polis' in Magna Graecia. Rome's 'unification' of Italy was more conquest than uniting frankly.

Not really. The Zhou polity and civilizational entity as you put was never a 100 percent unified and solid civilizational entity. There may have been cultural exchanges designed to suppress a later date of reckoning but that's exactly what happened. Cultural exchanges were taking place in an institutional desert which wasn't reformed until the Qin state blew everyone's military out of the water and actually unified the new and bigger state by force.

[Korin]

Wow the whole topic got derailed.

Edited by Korin, 20 April 2013 - 03:48 PM.