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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Erik Olson writes:
> Read of the end of Carthage:
> http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/polybius-punic3.html
> Don't skip the last paragraph where Scipio compares Carthage to Troy.
One could compare it to a much more present situation :-)
(funny how History repeats itself over and over again)
> Innumerable wars have ended with complete annihilation of the enemy.
Are you sure that so many wars ended that way? From my own experience, I
think it's a lot more common that the "losers" of one civilization will
eventually "melt" with the civilization which beat them. Miscigenation was
much easier in Ancient Times than it is now, wouldn't you agree?
For instance: Who was in the Iberian Peninsula before the Celts? The
Iberians. Who came after these two melted? The Romans. Were all inhabitants
of the Peninsula Romans by 1 AD?(as in "citizens of Rome")? No. And by the
time the Goths came, there was an indistinct mix of Roman and Celtiberians.
Later, when the Arabs came in, they found the Goths had adopted Roman ways.
Later, during the Christian Reconquest, and unlike common belief, Arabs were
most often converted "par force" (and integrated) rather than killed
outright... (1)
My point is simple: conquerors have little interest in anihilating a people
if they cannot populate the land they conquest. Romans could do so by the
end of the Punic wars (in fact, they *needed* to do so), but I'd argue that
is the exception rather than the rule.
> The
> world is littered with dead cities, dead languages, untraceable peoples. The
> Hittites seem to have been magnificently unlucky.
How many of them perished as the result of active genocide? Not that many...
most disappeared in a conjugation of factors, not by the sword alone. This
is not to say that wars were not the fuse for civilizational extinction - it
is to say that other things concurred to erase civilizations from the map
(natural disasters being the most obvious).
Pedro
(1) - I suppose you may have known this before, still other readers may
benefit from the example.
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Carthage
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| (...) That might be more common. Could ask the Statistics of Deadly Quarrels research folks about the majority. So maybe not so many whole civilizations, but certainly city-states and isolated population centers. Philip II at Thebes. Alexander at (...) (22 years ago, 26-Nov-02, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Not embarassed to be a Canadian anymore...
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| Read of the end of Carthage: (URL) skip the last paragraph where Scipio compares Carthage to Troy. Innumerable wars have ended with complete annihilation of the enemy. The world is littered with dead cities, dead languages, untraceable peoples. The (...) (22 years ago, 25-Nov-02, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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