I find it very a very romantic notion to have unknown areas on the world. Like some desert in the far south, beyond which might lie anything.
We have that today with outer space. For all intents and purposes it is the new ocean, and so far we've only put a few skiffs in it.
Fittingly, the term romance originally meant “to derive from a romantic language”, meaning mostly Latin which was spoken in the Roman Empire.
The texts in reference were largely about chivalry and such. Hence the modern connotations.
So like, romance refers to a time before the world was fully known. :)
Wow, I never clicked that the Romantic languages meant 'Roman'! Thanks!
When I was a child I also thought the world (or more precisely, the earth) was infinite. Must have inferred this from movies and cartoons somehow. I was soooo disappointed to learn that the earth was finite.
Maybe you should look into flat earth.
I'm not so sure this is accurate, the Romans certainly knew of China at least, to them it was called Serica, and they believed in a Manifest Destiny myth that they would one day conquer it.
Which would have been fukkin' wild if it did play out, I think by that point the capital would have moved to Samarkand or somewhere else in Central Asia just to be able to maintain regulation over the silk road.
And Tacitus described a people he called Fenni in northeastern Europe, and it's been conjectured that he could have meant one of the Finnic peoples around the continental side of the Baltic.
They also never annexed Ireland.
Yup. Not because they couldn't, but because they figured they had enough boggy northern European territory, and would rather spend resources on Africa, Persia or the Middle East, which had nice things they wanted.
Thoughts like that make me wish I could travel through time, just watching history and see how different it would be if this or that happened.
Heck, just go back 20k years and you'll see gobs of history we know nothing about.
I would kill for an alternative history TV show, where the Roman Empire and one of the Chinese dynasties control approximately half of Eurasia each. I have no talent for writing, so I dunno what the setup would be.
I kinda like the idea of it opening on a train heist. (If you set the tech at industrial revolution)
Make it a english / Chinese language collab show. Would be heckin' neat.
The harsh realities of Central Asian trench warfare as the Romans continue expanding in bursts and booms with developments in transportation and communication tech allowing greater and greater consolidation of what they have. Even the once mighty Persians are now only another saga told by Latin poets inhabiting a collection of provinces as Roman as Gaul or Germania Magna like the Carthaginians of old.
The wars narrow down to Samarkand as the two great empires tear apart the wide open landscapes of the Steppe to decide who will consume who.
The various Indian kingdoms have thrown in mostly with China knowing the tide is coming for them next, but Rome has made allies in Nusantara and Tamil country through the trade potential to all of them in cracking the jade egg.
China's already played their surprise card deploying their latest in gunpowder warfare technology, but the Romans have adapted in the most Roman way they possibly could, refining the digging process to allow soldiers to form a moving trench line that can crawl up against an enemy while allowing the soldiers to always be easily within cover. Roman propoganda now toutes the shovel as the symbol of Roman discipline and rank coordination.
With this stalemate an espionage operation is launched, two monks dispatched by the Emperor's secret order board a train bound for Nanqing. The Emperor has learned that the Middle Empire is transporting plans for the latest industrial marvel they've pulled out their asses to counter Rome's uncountable numbers. The monks are charged to seize the plans if possible, and make sure they never reach Nanqing if not.
Appropriately alt hist while also being a call out to a real heist that actually happened in real history, that being when Justinian ordered two monks to sneak into China, steal live silk worms, and make it back to Rome so that Rome could destroy China's monopoly on the stuff, and IIRC they pulled it off.
In medieval Europe, spices from outside the world known to Europeans made it there through chains of traders and were luxury items. (IIRC, a spice from what is now Indonesia is recorded as having been a gift at a wedding in what is now Poland in the 13th century.) I’m guessing the definition of “known to” in this post is similar: Romans had access (at a price) to goods from these places, though nobody from the Roman world had actually been there, or even met anyone from there.
As far as the ancient European world goes, I think the furthest east they actually got were some sort-lived Greek-speaking states in the vicinity of India.
People would follow the silk road sometimes. Rome actually had limited diplomatic contact with China, even. That's not on the map, maybe because they didn't really understand where it was, besides somewhere far to the east. I'm surprised SE Asia is on it, I'll have to do some reading about that, but India was known even to the Greeks.
Quality of information would drop off really rapidly with distance, though, since it was easy to make up a fish tale about what you saw in far-off lands. So, you find a lot of crazy BS mixed in with helpful nuggets in things like Herodotus's Histories.
There were hellenic Indo-Greek and Indo-Bactrian states in the northwestern India and Pakistan for some two hundred years. I recommend reading the wikipedia article about greek influence on buddhism. Fascinating stuff.
They didn't like the cold, huh?
They really didn't. They referred to the northern reaches that they didn't visit, mostly Greenland as ultima thule.
The modern interpretations have included Orkney, Shetland, Northern Scotland, the island of Saaremaa (Ösel) in Estonia, and the Norwegian island of Smøla.
By the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period, the Greco-Roman Thule was often identified with the real Iceland or Greenland. Sometimes Ultima Thule was a Latin name for Greenland, when Thule was used for Iceland. By the late 19th century, however, Thule was frequently identified with Norway.[6][7]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule
But yeah they were aware of things beyond the limits of their maps. So idk id this is more accurately "roughly around the limits of roman maps" instead of "the area the Roman empire ruled".
Tacitus for instance talks about the Fenni and the romans definitely visited and knew the Baltic Sea, but there probably wasn't a whole lot going on around 100AD that would've been of that much interest to the romans. Fishing and relatively poor trading (by Roman standards).
Going from Italy to Russia or the Himalayans is like going from Florida to Alaska, except that the Mediterranean is even more beautiful.
There are some pretty shots of Miami.
No sauna for the romans (only cold and hot baths, I guess)
Most Roman thermae featured a caldarium, which was like a hot steam sauna and the really fancy ones even had a laconicum which was kinda like a hot, dry sauna.
True, they never finnished their conquest to the north
I take issue with the wording. They already knew the earth was round and approximately 5000 stadia. Eratosthenes of Cyrene had proved it over a century before then.
They knew the Earth was round, yes, and I admit they could've used wording with a little less ambiguity. I think the best way to look at this is that the map shows what the Romans KNEW was there
your telling me they reached Malaysia before Finland??
The post says "known to" rather than "visited", though it's not clear what that actually means.
But there's very little in the way of written evidence of the Suomi until way, way more recently than the Roman Empire. It makes sense that they wouldn't be particularly interested in an area that was sparsely populated, not technically sophisticated, and had little in the way of then-usable resources.
AHEM you've included Scotland in that, bawbag
A sunken Roman Galleon was found in the Caribbean.
Gonna need a source for that one.
I can't find anything. The only articles I'm finding are about a Spanish Galleon that had $17bil in gold/silver that sunk off the coast of Colombia. I also find that claim incredibly suspicious as a Roman Galleon wouldn't be able to cross deep water oceans. Mediteranian sea, sure. Suez canal and Red Sea, if the thing had been built, but I'm pretty sure they just carried ships across land to the Red Sea/ Gulf of Suez
I'm not the one making the claim, but found something that this tall tale might be based on: https://www.grunge.com/756660/the-mysterious-bay-of-jars-explained/
Tldr: Brazilian entrepreneur throws some amphorae into a bay to grow barnacles on them for aesthetic reasons. Disreputable sea treasure hunter finds some of those, makes a flurry of wild claims, gets banned from Brazil for theft of actual antiquities from another wreck and he goes silent when people start asking more questions.
So the closest I came when looking for a source, was 20th century amphorae in a Brazilian bay, nothing about a roman shipwreck in the Carribean. But since the claim was a roman "galleon", a claim for it to be in the Carribean also means little.
Source on that one? That'd be almost a millennium before Norsemen arrived in Greenland, which was a pretty huge journey at that time. Getting to the Caribbean—without coming across via Greenland & Canada, for which there would surely be evidence, would be a much larger step than anything else going on at the time.
Finding a shipwreck doesn't necessarily mean the boat was sailed there, it might have been abandoned and drifted with the currents.
That's how Japanese ships ended up in America as well.
Doesn't make the Caribbean known to the Romans.
How about an attempt at sailing an Egyptian papyrus boat to the americas
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/heyerdahl-sails-papyrus-boat
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