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

Cicero details his discovery of the tomb of Archimedes when he was questor in Sicily.
"one of the most famous cities in the Greek world, and in former days a great center of learning as well, would have remained in total ignorance of the tomb of the most brilliant citizen it had ever produced, had a man from Arpinum not come and pointed it out!" This was in 75 BC, 137 years after the death of Archimedes.

The Iron Gates (Darband), a 3-kilometer (1.9 mi) mountain pass that separated the Indo-Greek kingdoms from Central Asian nomads.
The Graeco-Bactrian ruler Euthydemus (230–200 BC) built a great wall there to protect the kingdom.
c. 130 BC a nomadic people, the Yuezhi, invaded Bactria swarmed the kingdom, and killed its last ruler.
Remains of the wall

When the kingdom of Ahoms defeated the Mughal empire in 1667, stopping its eastern advance, they put up a victory pillar stating they were "victorious in the war waged by the Yavana (=Ionians)".
Almost 2 millennia after the end of the Indo-Greek kingdoms they were still calling their western neighbors Greeks. "There flourished the Borphukan of Namjani, son of Barbarua. He became victorious in the war waged by the Yavana in the full array of various kinds of weapons and arms, elephants, horses, and captains. The body of the Borphukan is adorned by various kind of ornaments, his heart is illumined by manifold learning, he is endowed by the qualities which is tainted by the sins of Kali-yuga, he is effulgent in prowess and enterprises, he is the commander of elephants, horses, and soldiers, he is like an ocean in regard to fortitude self-respect, heroism, and gravity."

In India, there are status differences between castes and there are also status differences within sub-castes. Kulin Brahmin the most successful sub-caste of Bengali Brahmins are 4-5 times overrepresented as doctors.
Previous to the reservation system they accounted for 15-25% of doctors in Bengal while being 2-3% of the population.

From which regions in the U.K. to which U.S colonies
did migration happen, based on surname analysis in the 19th-century U.S. census.🧵
Highlanders. Scots-Irish.

Just finished reading "Letters from Mesopotamia", here are some thousands of years old letters preserved in cuneiform.
1. "Mom buy me this" - Iddin-Sin to his mother 2. "Dad buy me this" - Adad-abum to his father.

We have economic records on military supply to soldiers in the Neo-Sumerian empire (beer, boots, barley..) based on this we know something about units and army sizes.
There is a mention of a monthly shipment of 365,710 liters of barley, which could supply 6000-12,000 troops, regular units were usually between 600-2000 people. "Here, we have a powerful military commander, appointed by the king of Ur, and about whom we learn
that the troops available to him consisted of at least 2 × 5,000 = 10,000 soldiers"

A study tracking the fertility of 1,726 women plus their 7,256 friends and peers finds that women whose friend gave birth see a 13.7 increase in childbirth in the following 3 years, the same effect is not seen among mere peers. The effect is only seen in intended childbirth strengthening the evidence that the increase in fertility is driven by choice due to the "friend effect".

Study found that the burnt incense at the Temple of Yahweh in the ancient Kingdom of Judah contained cannabis.
"This is the first time that cannabis has been identified in the Ancient Near East"
"The shrine is also contemporaneous with the first Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, suggesting similar ritual practices may have taken place at the biblical house of worship" smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/can…