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

Mountainous Asturia was the last holdup of the Islamic conquest of Iberia, it was also the last refuge of the Roman conquest of Iberia:
"In the west, almost all Spain had been subjugated, except that part which adjoins the cliffs where the Pyrenees end and is washed by the nearer waters of the ocean. Here two powerful nations, the Cantabrians and the Asturians, lived in freedom from the rule of Rome." - Florus Epitome of Roman history.
It took ten years of war under Augustus, and more than 50,000 troops to finally subjugate the region. The massive Roman army with Augustus himself present enclosed the Cantabrians "on all sides", sieges were made on mountain fortresses. A besieged fort on Mount Medullus was "surrounded by a continuous earthwork extending over eighteen miles"

Strabo on productive capacity and loot taken from Carthage at the end of the Punic Wad.
"After being besieged and compelled to surrender, they delivered up 200,000 complete suits of armor and 3000 engines for throwing projectiles" "The Romans made a province of that part of the country which had been subject to Carthage, and appointed ruler of the rest Masanasses and his descendants, beginning with Micipsa"

Synesius, a member of the Greek elite of the coastal town of Cyrene, had a bad time at the court of Emperor Arcadius, and is now sailing back to the comfort of his home, but comfort is the last thing he'll get.
Instead he will "suffer such things as we never thought to happen even in our dreams." "Hear my story then, that you may have no further leisure for your mocking wit, and I will tell you first of all how our crew was made up."

One possible reason why Phoenicians didn't have as strong a demographic impact on their colonies as the Greeks might be because of their widespread religious practice of infanticide.

https://twitter.com/nrken19/status/1896925174869692531

https://x.com/lefineder/status/1878914777621377197

How the Romans saw various groups:

Ancient DNA from an Old Kingdom Egypt skeleton from Nuerat 2,868-2,492 BC shows around 90% the ancestry of Ancient Egyptians is from a Levantine population (likely farming migration) with 10% admixture from local east Africans (mota).
Comparing Old Kingdom ancestry to ancestry in the third intermediate period (1077 BC – 664 BC) there is a further genetic contribution of Levantine populations into Egypt (c. 15%) possibly due to the Hyksos invasions into Egypt, and/or migrations from the north under the New Kingdom Egypt period when Egypt ruled much of the Levant.
On a PCA plot showing how genetically distant various populations are, the old kingdom sample (NUE001, in red) clusters closely with Levantine populations (derived from Natufians).

Breakdown of activity on Trajan's column which details his conquest of Dacia. Roman and Dacian troops

Golden Age Netherlands, had the highest rates of literacy in Europe, 30% higher wages, relatively low crime, inclusive institutions with strong property rights enforced by a democratically elected economically conscious elite, the largest merchant fleet, largest private corporation, free trade, advanced stock market, and zero long term productivity growth. "When it comes to explaining why England was the first nation to experience modern productivity growth rates, the puzzle is deepened by the example of one earlier economy, the Netherlands,"

Indo-Greek and Greco-Bactrian Kingdoms at their greatest extents.
Strabo on the Rise of Greek power in the east:
"The Greeks who caused Bactria to revolt grew so powerful on account of the fertility of the country that they became masters, not only of Ariana but also of India..and more tribes were subdued by them than by Alexander – by Menander in particular..for some were subdued by him personally and others by Demetrius, the son of Euthydemus the king of the Bactrians; and they took possession, not only of Patalena but also, on the rest of the coast, of what is called the kingdom of Saraostus and Sigerdis. In short, Apollodorus says that Bactriana is the ornament of Ariana as a whole; and, more than that, they extended their empire even as far as the Seres and the Phryni"
More on Euthydemus and Greco-Bactria in this thread.

https://x.com/lefineder/status/1878939099567964161