Germans accounted for 19% of the ministers in the Russian Empire, despite being around 1% of the empire's population.

Most of these Germans were 'Baltic Germans' incorporated into the empire during the conquests of the Great Northern War (1720). Only 80 years later, we already see that Germans have risen into positions of high prominence in the Committee of Ministers of Alexander I. Detailed origin of ministers.
The other non-foreign non-Baltic German ministers are probably Volga Germans brought in by Catherine the Great.
"The six ministers of German descent were either two or three generations removed from their families' immigration to the Russian Empire."

Linear B tablets mention Women taken as war captives from Anatolia, showing Mycenaean Greeks were raiding the region of Troy.
"These descriptions often use the word lawiaiai, ‘captives’, which is the same word used by Homer to describe women seized by Achilles."

Note that the Iliad begins with Achilles' rage about Agamemnon not handing him a captive woman (Briseis). The Mycenaeans were very familiar with the coasts of West Asia, and many places there are referenced in Linear B tablets.

Greco-Roman writers were the first to use coordinates of latitude and longitude to map places, and the first to lay down geometrical treaties specifying how to project regions onto maps.
This transformed Geography from a mere itinerary, schematically displaying places, into a real science based on mathematical principles.

Ptolemy's Geography, written around 150 AD, gives the coordinates of 8,000 different places, on top of being a monumental achievement in pre-modern mapping, when these coordinates are compared to modern Greenwich coordinates, a tight correlation is seen (0.98) between the numbers, indicating a remarkable degree of accuracy.
Comparison of Ptolemy’s longitudes and latitudes with real values.
ancientportsantiques.com/ancientmaps/cl…

Jokes from the "Philogelos", the oldest surviving joke book (dated 4th century AD).🧵
208. Someone asks a cowardly boxer, ‘Whom do you have a fight with today?’ With a polite gesture in the direction of his opponent, he answers, ‘With that dear sweet gentleman over there.’

A Frankish Odyssey.
Around 279, Emperor Probus defeated the Germanic people in a series of wars. As part of the peace agreement, Germanic groups were resettled throughout the empire. This included a group of Franks who were resettled in the region of Pontus on the coast of the black sea, but almost as soon as they were settled, the Franks rebelled.

Taking control of a fleet stationed in an Euxine harbor, they sailed out of the black sea into the Mediterranean, pillaging their way through Anatolia, Greece, and North Africa. They ravaged the famous city of Syracuse in Sicily and tried to take Carthage, but were repulsed. Eventually, they reached and passed the Pillars of Heracles into the Atlantic Ocean.
From there, they coasted from Hispania to Gaul, passing the British Channel until they returned to the shores of their home. Here's Edward Gibbon's description of the odyssey from his history:
"Of all the barbarians who abandoned their new settlements, and disturbed the public tranquillity, a very small number returned to their own country....The successful rashness of a party of Franks was attended, however, with such memorable consequences"

The share of rulers whose birth year is known can be used as a measure of the quality of recordkeeping in a given society at a particular time.
When the elite bureaucracy that produces and maintains historical records is poor, we get the names of rulers but not accurate numerical information, such as the year of their birth.

Statistical evidence for the previous statement can be seen in the fact that medieval European regions with a greater share of rulers with a known birth year have a higher per capita production of manuscripts and higher rates of numeracy among the elite( by looking at the degree of age heaping in their recorded ages).

Now, keeping all this in mind, let us look at the quality of recordkeeping since the start of the Roman Republic. 🧵
Rulers in the time of the Roman Republic were the consuls. Due to various historical reasons, we have data on all Roman consuls, 737 people, serving between 509 BC - 31 BC.
The % of whose birth year is known by century can be extracted from the digital prospography of Rome.

Late Bronze Age collapse in west Anatolia.
Number of archaeological sites in west Anatolia from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age, from 435 to 120. Data from the Luwian site atlas
luwianstudies.org/siteatlas/adva…

What Luwian hieroglyphics looked like.
Luwian was the main language spoken on the western coast of Anatolia in the Bronze Age, and was likely the language of Homeric Troy.
This inscription was found in Hattuša, the Capital of the Hittites. omniglot.com/writing/luwian…

35 percent of men in medieval England were called John.
More than half of men were named John or William.
From data from the 1377-1381 poll tax. historynewsnetwork.org/blog/4078

Ruina montium, "wrecking of mountains", A Roman mining technique in which pressurized water was used to crack mountain walls.
Pliny's description: "The third method will have outdone the achievements of the Giants. By means of galleries driven for long distances the mountains are mined by the light of lamps—the spells of work are also measured by lamps, and the miners do not see daylight for many months.

The name for this class of mines is arrugiae; also cracks give way suddenly and crush the men who have been at work, so that it actually seems less venturesome to try to get pearls and purple-fishes out of the depth of the sea: so much more dangerous have we made the earth!" "Las Médulas, the most important gold mine in the Roman Empire. The spectacular landscape resulted from the ruina montium mining technique"

Since the invention of exact perspective in the 1420s, which was followed by other artistic innovations, the price of paintings in Renaissance Italy tripled.
This is true even when controlling for characteristics of the painting and who painted them, indicating that the increase in the quality of paintings driven by these innovations was driving up demand, making paintings more profitable. "The expected compensations of a young apprentice (unaware of his future talent) were increasing during the fifteenth century. But a similar increase in profitability also applies conditioning on the talent of the painter...reaches levels in the 1480s that are about three times those of the 1420s."

Prehistoric Uralic speakers were on the eastern edge of Siberia. They met Indo-Iranian speakers moving east, received some genetic admixture, adopted horses and bronze metallurgy, and then journeyed to the west to conquer Finland.
"Yakutia_LNBA is associated with migrations of prehistoric Uralic speakers. We show that Yakutia_LNBA first dispersed westwards...into West Siberian communities associated with Seima-Turbino metallurgy....Seima-Turbino period individuals were diverse in their ancestry, also harbouring DNA from Indo-Iranian-associated pastoralists...Thus, both cultural transmission and migration were key to the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, which was involved in the initial spread of early Uralic-speaking communities."

88 papyrus documents mention the size of the cargo of ships entering Ptolemaic Egypt.
A general increase can be seen over time, such that by the mid-2nd century BC, the average size of the cargo of 37 ships entering the port of Alexandria was 179 tons!

This general increase in the size of ships and the capacity of ports is largely due to the achievements of Hellenistic Greek engineers in shipbuilding and port construction, one example of which is the Mega-Ship of Ptolemy IV Philopator, which had an unprecedented 4000 rowers and required the construction of a dry dock for its launch (c. 200 BC) which could be flooded by opening it to the sea and drained by "means of engines (organois)" after the ship returned to it. Plutarch's description of the 'Tessarakonteres', the 4000 rowers.

Historic European marriage and household types from data on 11 million individuals in 256 regions from 1700 to 1927.
"Female SMAM" - Average age of Marriage for Women.
"Female Service" - % of unmarried women working as servants among unmarried women.
"Marriage-Headship difference" - is the avg number of years since marriage to becoming head of a household.
"Proportion of Nuclear families" - looks at the Proportion of single-family households. Date can be represented as two clusters, an Eastern and Western pattern of Marriage

Religious Affiliations of American elites in subsequent editions of "Who's Who in America", a biographical dictionary of notable Americans.

Highlighted threads from last month (April).
The Roman march into Saxony

https://x.com/lefineder/status/1907546075382370545

The Roman conquest of Czechoslovakia. Almost.

https://x.com/lefineder/status/1907234152879190213

There are many surviving letters of Julian, the last Pagan emperor of the Roman Empire.
Here are some of them.
A letter to his friend Alypius, A Geographer and Mapmaker:
"You need no king to help you to conquer a city, while I on the other hand need many to help me to raise up again what has fallen on evil days." In 355, after Julian became Caesar under his cousin Constantius, he was sent to Gaul to fight against Germanic incursions across the Rhine River.
In 359, he wrote to a couple of his fellow students and friends from Athens.

The ancient Greek geographer, Isidore of Charax, wrote about his 4300 km (2670 miles) journey across the Parthian empire undertaken around 26 BC.
A surviving itinerary of his work recalls him coming across many Greek cities, temples, forts, a custom station, royal stations, and a place in Arsaces where the "everlasting fire is guarded". Isodore's journey ended in "Alexandropolis" a Greek "metropolis" on the edge of the empire

Did the disasters that ended the Classical world and ushered in the Dark Ages extend further eastwards into India?
Demographic data collected by a Chinese Buddhist monk who spent the years AD 629-45 on a long pilgrimage in India provides some interesting clues🧵 During Xuanzang's (Hiuen Tsang) travels through India, he provided a wealth of information on the size of regions and cities, and also some commentary on the state of the population in those regions.

The ancient Greeks had a Bone Rush.
In the 7-5 centuries BC Greek states scrambled to find giant bones which they attributed to mythical Heroes. The ancient writer Pausanias alone records more than two dozen cases of finds.

We are told that the Spartans dug up the huge remains 'Orestes' in Tegea and that the Athenians did the same for the bones of the legendary Theseus which they brought from Skyros.

Since many of these finds occurred in sites that are confirmed by modern paleontologists to be plentiful in fossils, the bones of heroes were likely the fossilized remains of various extinct species. Tegea, where the bones of Orestes were found "lies in a prehistoric lake basin that contains the remains of mammoths and other Ice Age mammals"

In 904 AD the great Byzantine city of Thessaloniki, second only to Constantinople, was sacked by the Abbasids, 15,000 persons were killed and 30,000 were taken as slaves.
John Kaminiates, a survivor, who was in the city at the time gave a detailed description of this disaster. The city in its region