My office manager in Pakistan has a 10th grade education. His earlier profession was as a guy incharge of deliveries for logistics company so he travelled a lot. He speaks 6 languages.

Only in the US,UK, Australia etc is multilingualism a sign of education. In most places it's standard.

Some Western bias in your post. Persia was a superpower, the Greek city states were a border irritant. (Until some guy called Alexander showed up). It's much more likely the Greeks had Persian speakers.

I've been here since 2012(ish) and I don't think I've seen better words to describe this site.

This would be an interesting read for r/Romania. Thanks OP!

I find the King and emperor relationship a good example. Just a twist with the Caesar is that i think it also implies succession. Maybe like a king and crown prince relationship.

I agree, so much respect is rare on reddit. Love to you all :)

Once Julius got it started everyone with eyes on power in the Roman world would mint coins as propaganda tools. Brutus minted coins to commentate murdering Caesar with his face on one side and daggers on the reverse. And you could do this because the coins were struck… with a hammer. Anyone with reserves of metal could do it not just the emperor at some super secure mint.

Yet while being on denarii doesn’t make you emperor it is physical evidence you existed.

Imperialism rules the world for a reason

>as long as they swear allegiance

*pay massive amounts of money in taxes/tribute

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If you declare yourself an emperor, rule territory, and no one stops you... Aren't you an emperor?

What about Mesopotamia?

I don’t know if it’s necessarily offensive, just inaccurate. Indigenous Australians had over 200 distinct languages before colonisation. The term “Aborigines” reduces them to one group.

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What flooding are you referring too? It’s probably different to what we are discussing.

Those are isolated flooding which is not what the OP was referring too.

Well no wonder. He looks like a vampire

It would be funny if he was still fake but had been made up in the third century rather than much later.

So some guy creates this coin of a made up emperor as some elaborate prank, and then since we can prove it was old enough to be genuine we assume that said emperor was real

My grandparents were members of the sharps island yacht club before I was born. They lived on Leeds Creek nearby. The “yacht club” consisted of people rafting up their boats on the sandbar that used to be the island and drinking.

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It's not super surprising to have a similar system pop-up.

Ruler of one region defeats the other. The victor, in order to more easily control a larger region, leaves the defeated ruler locally in charge as long as they swear allegiance to the larger empire.

There was another dubious emperor at about the same time, Silbannacus, known from two coins found in France.

I've noticed that a lot of cultures have myths around the sun and moon. Specific examples including Inuit and Egyptian folklore refers to one chasing the other. I've wondered if references to celestial bodies might actually have been describing supernova.

Personally while I doubt I would have understood what the sun or moon actually were, given I was alive during an earlier period, I can't imagine the sun or the moon would inspire much intrigue or mysticism. They've been around for an incredibly long time and early humans would have been quite used to being unable to accurately or definitively explain their environment, but imagine if one day a star brighter than the moon appeared in the sky, clearly visible during the day and slowly faded over several months.

I could imagine that experience being passed down through oral tradition, with successive generations not experiencing similar events for hundreds or thousands of years due to the rarity of said events. Successive generations may have interpreted these stories as describing the sun and moon as a result, possibly even modifying them intentionally to better narrate their environment.

Related to your point about the devastation a relatively mild flood of today's standards could have had on our ancestors and how different cultures could generate similar flood mythos as a result, I think the same could have occurred in religions or folklore from attempts to describe a variety of different events.

It would make sense that if two distinct groups experienced a volcanic eruption, earthquake or tsunami even if they were separated by a large amount of time or space, could describe these events in similar ways. Also reminiscent of folklore similarities between supernatural entities, I believe many cultures describe a demon/creature/entity that would sneak into your home as you slept to drain your strength/power/life often alongside a feeling of being crushed or held down. Personally I've always thought this could be a way of describing sleep paralysis.