How could a group of barbarians living in at least somewhat marginal land, like extremely dense forests or swamps, develop a highly scholarly culture?
How could a group of barbarians living in at least somewhat marginal land, like extremely dense forests or swamps, develop a highly scholarly culture?
>barbarians
>scholalry
Is this another AI-made thread? The frick is with combining random incompatible concepts?
Something for unusually thin paper, something for long-lasting cases, something for adhesive, used to invent books to house Frickhuge Epics of the renowned ass-kickers of yore with more exacting detail between generations.
The chief barrier to scholastic pursuit is typically ability to handle stored information, which for a very long time was held back by oral recital holding primacy, then by the low density of scrolls.
Having a typically "barbaric" high-volume oral tradition they wish to bring more consistency to gives an impetus for innovating the storage medium, thus creating a critical advantageous backbone to other scholarly pursuits simply for being able to hold onto the information at larger scales.
This method almost certainly demands a lot of warrior-poets penning the first-hand account of their exploits for future generations, and ends up making historiography the primary scholastic pursuit, but it does fulfil the request.
As the term "barbarian" originates with simply "those outside the dominant civilization", principally Greece or Rome, it actually can apply to a highly scholastic group provided they lack the large-scale institutions to build an advanced society with that information.
Such as being nomadic horse-archers, or extremely clannish in the most blood-feud prone fashion, or dividing rulership of land between sons. These would slow down the cross-referencing of information, but not prevent it outright.
This works doubly well when you have a relatively recent civilization collapse, where the "civilized" heartland hasn't finished rebuilding expertise but neighboring "barbarians" didn't suffer institutional collapse to lose it in the first place.
Why do you
put a space between
every line
like a moron from reddit?
Because Ganker has wider text display space than anywhere else I post and the reply box needs manually stretched to match it? For example, this section is four lines as I've typed it out and most of two lines on the XenForo sites I visit.
I actively make smaller posts on mobile because of this, to my own annoyance when returning to the thread on desktop. Simply because I refuse to be TYPING true walls of text.
Swamps are a very bad idea as the humidity is a problem for almost every kind of long-term information storage. It'd be a BIG challenge to preserve virtually anything, including food should there be a proper freezing winter.
Writing on bamboo maybe?
Think nomadic or semi-nomadic people living on the fringes of "civilization" then.
He wants his giant wall of text to be readable. You must have a frightfully low education level.
>Walls of text
Zoomers need to be educated
If you use as loose of a definition for Barbarian as just 'not Roman', then basically any other civilization qualifies.
More practically, if you just want an excuse for shirtless people with oiled chests who also write things down, that's just Egypt. A lot of similar Middile-Eastern societies could probably also qualify depending on how you swing it.
Putting them in a jungle or a swamp just means all of their books are more likely to rot or get lost in a wildfire.
Also, Barbarians demanding books assumes that they actually have a way to read the books, which would imply extensive enough trade or interaction with civilized peoples where it just raises the question why these are considered barbarians by anything other than the loosest definition.
>Barbarians ride out from their barbarian city with their barbaric libraries and barbaric public works, follow along their barbaric roads to the lands their barbaric merchants have learned the language of, making a barbaric demand of books to bring home to their barbaric scholars before debating barbarian ethics
Replace the word Barbarian/Barbaric with Cyberpunk or any other vague descriptor and it means just as much.
The loose definition I, the second person you replied to, was using is mainly about the large-scale infrastructure. Just because you have a library with the full suite of Roman engineering practices doesn't mean you have anywhere near enough manpower or stone to use it, which is how I imagine "scholarly barbarians" to go.
Even in your example, their "roads" can be raw if clever earthworks compared to the society they're raiding having asphalt or concrete industries for solid-material pavement, and their "public works" being evaporation loss infested aquifers compared to fully-enclosed plumbing. Rome would be "barbaric" in comparison to Victorian Britain by this standard.
>Just because you have a library with the full suite of Roman engineering practices doesn't mean you have anywhere near enough manpower or stone to use it
But for it to be of any value at all, or at least to be of enough value to haul back from another country after a war, you'd need people who can actually read Latin. That presumably means you have at least semi-consistent peaceful contact with Rome, likely meaning trade and similar things.
Again, I use Egypt as an example since they were plenty scholarly and existed at the same time as Rome, but they weren't showing up to loot Rome for its books, because they could just send scholars and merchants to learn things. Even if they didn't have the ability to implement things they learned, they still had quite a lot of access to it.
What sense would it make to send a bunch of warriors to raid Rome in order to steal more books that they could read but not use?
>Think nomadic or semi-nomadic people living on the fringes of "civilization" then.
A nomadic lifestyle is pretty fricking garbage for scholarly living. Part of the benefit of agrarian societies is division of labor, since rather than everyone needing to be a self-sufficient horse archer, you can have some people whose job it is to keep records of all this grain you're harvesting.
Carrying around a bunch of heavy tomes and stone tablets also isn't exactly ideal.
I think the best you could get would be some sort of central henge or other religious site around which all of the people's sages gather, and the nomadic tribes convene there to spread knowledge. But again, if they're raiding people for books, they'd need to actually be able to understand the books in question.
Assuming they do accumulate a lot of knowledge though, then you're just gonna get visitors bringing books as gifts so that they can read at the grand library. And at that point you either need a city for them to stay, or a fort to keep them out.
I think to make the idea more realistic they would have to learn for the sake of survival in the way that steep nomads had to ride and shoot. Probably means living in a place where scientific observation is a survival skill.
Runestones and the like, along with oral tradition, do seem like good ones, along with extensive memorization techniques.
The most livable places are occupied by settled peoples already. Why would anyone live in the desert or the deep woods or marshlands irl?
>The most livable places are occupied by settled peoples already. Why would anyone live in the desert or the deep woods or marshlands irl?
I think you missed my point. I'm trying to say that people who live in shitholes cannot develop a scholarly cultures because of the demands of their environment. The "why don't they go somewhere else" was very rhetorical.
Education as a cultural skill seems as possible as anything.
I was thinking wild magic led to them developing something like the scientific method, and they're starting to flourish now because they're writing and transmitting knowledge that they're recording between one another and becoming extensively literate. The idea is basically that you're in this place where magical phenomena are happening. You have to figure out quickly if it's a danger to be avoided, or a potential resource to be utilized. If you can observe and test it to figure out if it's dangerous or helpful, then you're more likely to survive. Generations of that as cultural practice seems like it would lead to something like scientific methodology, or a very rudimentary form of it.
Then you give them exposure to books, and it just sort of becomes a self feeding cycle.
Extensive memory and oral or bardic tradition would probably be a good way that they would start going about it.
>Education as a cultural skill seems as possible as anything.
And it is, just not scholarly education. These people educate in the sense that they train the next generation in vital life skills. Nobody is generating knowledge beyond what's required to survive, because nobody has time for that. Everyone HAS to spend the majority of their time producing enough food to survive, because they don't live in environment where they can easily produce enough food to sustain non-food jobs.
>Everyone HAS to spend the majority of their time producing enough food to survive, because they don't live in environment where they can easily produce enough food to sustain non-food jobs.
Even in the harshest environments you will find a priestly caste who doesn't directly contribute to the survival of their people but hunting or growing, but by "working" for the tribe on a spiritual level, performing the rites and making the prayers than the people believe are essential. A "scholarly" civilisation will never be one made entirely of scholars, but one noted for the fame and brilliance of a small scholarly caste drawn either from the priesthood or the aristocracy. Even if the majority of people are eking a living from a harsh land, if the people truly value learning they will support a caste of people who can perpetuate it.
This thread is another inane piece of garbage that could have been slopped out by a chatbot, but I wanted to add that the idea that a famously wise civilisation must always be a literary one is plain wrong. There are plenty of real world examples of pre and barely literate cultures creating and passing down great works of literature and philosophy - see Greek epic poetry, the riddles and wit of Celtic bards. Premodern people had an extraordinary capacity to retain information without the written word that we've almost entirely lost today.
Civilizations don’t pop up in the harshest environments, the Nile is not a harsh environment
A people doesn't have to be civilised to be intellectually sophisticated. Were a people is formed and where they end up are also very different things, most of the barbarian tribes that threatened Rome throughout history were settled people who had been forced to leave their homelands.
Also both Rome and Tenochtitlan were built in spots.
*built on swamps.
The swamps were drained historylet
Tenochtitlan was fully drained after the Spanish messed up the maintenance of the water system.
Before then, much was built on top of the water. But chinampas are weird and calling either drained or as swamp can go either way. But the city was built on swamp and the island was dried more as the city built up.
>I think to make the idea more realistic they would have to learn for the sake of survival in the way that steep nomads had to ride and shoot
Except oral tradition is usually sufficient for that. If you need knowledge to survive, that's something your family teaches you. It's not something you learn from a book you stole from some guy who lives in some far off land.
Unless they're constantly assaulted by killer robots who ask them math and physics questions, textbooks aren't going to help them. And if the place is that hostile, then that means rather than some barbarian tribe, you're looking at something more akin to a bunch of space explorers who crash landed, were only able to survive thanks to extensive scientific knowledge, and now their descendants are guarding a wealth of extremely advanced knowledge in a place that is considered too confusing and dangerous to even be habitable.
That goes well beyond just a swamp or a desert.
>You seem to have an absurdly reductive view synonymizing the culture group with a singular policy position.
Yes. Because OP asked:
>How could a group of barbarians ... develop a highly scholarly culture?
You're damn right having a few random scholars is not the same thing as having a highly scholarly culture. Would you seriously argue that vikings, as a culture, were highly scholarly?
>Except oral tradition is usually sufficient for that. If you need knowledge to survive, that's something your family teaches you
Recurrent diseases to which the only available remedy is even more dangerous when not processed with respect to low-level (al)chemical properties, for example, would dictate much more detail than oral tradition tends to support. Especially if the timeframe of recurrence is multi-generational.
>Yes. Because OP asked:
And how does the question necessitate the group be so narrowly defined as to have a singular policy position on this level? Why can the "barbarians" not have both merchants and raiders acquiring resources that happen to include texts?
>You're damn right having a few random scholars is not the same thing as having a highly scholarly culture.
A culture that habitually brings scholars to record battles as they happen and includes texts in the looting very much would be, if lacking precise historical precedent.
>Would you seriously argue that vikings, as a culture, were highly scholarly?
The point is that they demonstrate your "merchants are better at getting texts than raiders" point is a false dichotomy, because the Scandinavians who went Viking were also merchants. Sometimes literally the same guys would be both, using their experience as merchants to act as guides for the only-raider members of the group.
>Recurrent diseases to which the only available remedy is even more dangerous when not processed with respect to low-level (al)chemical properties
Perhaps, but that's not something which is like riding or horse archery, where everyone within the culture needs to be a medical expert in order to prevent. Nor is it something that would be particularly conductive to the establishment of any sort of society in a location.
If the first nomads that move in suffer a major blight, and then suffer another every 3 generations, they're more likely to die or leave such a cursed land than stick around and become doctors.
>Why can the "barbarians" not have both merchants and raiders acquiring resources that happen to include texts?
Firstly, because I would assume that if 'Vikings' was a sufficient answer to OP's question, he wouldn't have made such a thread.
Secondly, 'happen to include texts' would mean that the books aren't the main goal. Contrast that with
where the barbarians show up and just demand books.
But if you think Vikings qualify as scholarly Barbarians, don't tell it to me. Tell it to OP.
>The idea is basically that you're in this place where magical phenomena are happening. You have to figure out quickly if it's a danger to be avoided, or a potential resource to be utilized
That's basically the idea of folk tales in real life, where it's a bunch of stories about how you shouldn't start howling when the wind is, because that's how you get kidnapped by a ghosts.
Writing that down would certainly be helpful, but it also doesn't help them that much to get foreign texts if these sorts of happenings are local. It's like getting a book from some desert merchant for how to deal with flooding: purely hypothetical and wholly insufficient if you're in the middle of an arcane hurricane.
See, wild magic is generally bespoke. So it's more like having to do science every time you encounter an instance of it in order to figure out if it's a potential resource or a potential threat, and if you're good at it then your tribe reaps the benefits of a magical resource.
Nomads had some degree of social sophistication, and hunter gatherers didn't spend every waking moment of their time hunting more food.
>But for it to be of any value at all, or at least to be of enough value to haul back from another country after a war, you'd need people who can actually read Latin. That presumably means you have at least semi-consistent peaceful contact with Rome, likely meaning trade and similar things.
Any attention payed to "the Viking age" shows otherwise, the same culture produced both the most widely traveled merchants the world had yet seen and some of the most disruptive raiders in centuries. And that translation isn't a thing to have only a tiny minority who needs multilingual literacy.
>But for it to be of any value at all, or at least to be of enough value to haul back from another country after a war, you'd need people who can actually read Latin. That presumably means you have at least semi-consistent peaceful contact with Rome, likely meaning trade and similar things.
Bringing some scholarly people along with to record your fights and bringing them books while looting the usual stuff, then your fifth cousin living with another clan showing up a month later selling timber for the rebuilding and giving books to the same scholars, is entirely possible. The raiding groups can share information with the merchant groups in their shared native language.
You seem to have an absurdly reductive view synonymizing the culture group with a singular policy position.
a typically "barbaric" high-volume oral tradition they wish to bring more consistency to gives an impetus for innovating the storage medium, thus creating a critical advantageous backbone to other scholarly pursuits simply for being able to hold onto the information at larger scales.
Anon, it's because China invented a way to mass-produce paper for cheap. They already had writing materials, but they were much more difficult to access before China's innovations in writing materials spread to the rest of the world.
I got tickled by the idea of the barbarians showing up at the gates and demanding all of your books as tribute.
Do you think a written language that can contain a very high amount of information per character, and something like reed paper and natural ink would do the job? If they are from the swamps in particular I'm thinking that they would cart their writings around with them in little boats.
Its a sperg spamming shitty threads to kill tg while banning people who call him out on it. All because nobody likes his threads
Oral tradition, runestones, beaded string, any of the rl methods to retain and share information from societies without the technology for paper could work. In this case I'd say that "barbarian" is probably being used closer to the Roman intent than the modern berserker idea, where it applies to any culture not of your big empire.
A shit anon's shitty guide to advancement of society or something
1: Do you eat, though?
2: No really, does everyone eat?
3: Do people eat enough that not everybody has to make food and stuff all the time?
4: Is there enough that some people can say frick food production and exclusively do something else, something that other people think is kinda cool?
5: Hey it's pretty cool that there's more than enough so we should get more people to get more stuff so we can even more people and even more stuff and maybe some of those people can start making better stuff?
so yeah the problem isn't barbarians it's the buttholes deciding to live in a shithole. Why don't they go somewhere else?
The toll for passing through their lands is books.
They couldn't.
By using the art of memory and a bardic tradition. The druids were scholarly.
Hear me out.
>Forests are dreaded
>Swamps and rainforests are considered to be taboo, you just avoid them
>Wild magic phenomena happen there
>It takes a truly desperate people to even camp in a forest, traverse a swamp, or step foot in a rainforest
>It's a place for lost souls and the truly, truly desperate
>People who come back from those places are lucky if they have a weird story, unlucky if they come back with a curse, and a prayer is said for their souls if they don't come back at all
>Here come these barbarians from those places
>They are congenial, polite, and they are willing to work as scribes, solve math equations, and conduct scientific inquiry
>They demand your books
>Have a socio-relgious situation that support it
Wow, that was hard!
And so very much about games, either playing or making them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_bark_manuscript
NEXT!
Thanks.
I've actually been reading about the concept of barbarians in a cultural sense a lot more. The tl;dr is that the notion of a barbarian exists solely as a contrast that does not accurately describe the barbarian, but that exists solely as a critique of the culture being contrasted with the barbarians in question.
Our barbarians are scholarly but materially poor with a seemingly low level of technical sophistication. They exist to critique a society that is materially rich and technically sophisticated but unscholarly.
Barbarian and savage are usually terms to describe people from other cultures to your own because their set of values and culture are different or even opposite to what you are used to, it doesn't mean they don't have customs, laws, art, crafts, architecture or social hierarchy. Even primitive humans have them even if some are simple forms. Because someone in your family fought as a soldier in a war doesn't lock them to being a soldier for the rest of their lives, unless they die in it.
Maybe they found the ruins of an ancient civilization in the forest and began studying its manuscripts. Maybe the barbarian shamans would transition to being more like monks preserving, translating, and copying the ancient texts. Maybe they’d begin to use knowledge from it, but their understanding is incomplete or misguided.
In the movie “Wizards” future non-human people’s discover the ruins of 20th century human civilization and are inspired by Hitler to try and take over the world, but their ability to copy 20th technology is limited.
Also a distinct possibility. Studying ancient manuscripts would explain how they're getting a bunch of math and science out of nowhere.
Look up the history of the Netherlands.
Windmills, sunflowers, and tulips, right?
Tulips were just a notable symbol for an incident. Becoming a major commercial center on account of the European silver boom and their shipping capability is what propelled them upwards.
>barbarians
>highly scholarly culture
They wouldn't. The same way you wouldn't see a group of married bachelors. It doesn't fit. Not that they can't be wise, but a barbarian lifestyle by definition eschews scholarly stuff like that. Namely due to being nomadic, not having books or much to settle down with, preferring a more primitive lifestyle, etc. If they have a sophisticated scholarly culture then they aren't barbarians.
They have to spend half the year sitting inside because everything outside is frozen. Basically, Iceland.
Cuneform tablets held in self-sufficient mountain strongholds full of oldsters used as seasonal rallying points for a larger nomadic population?
Hear me out. The smart ones are bards. The dumb ones are the npc class version of bards. They sing and memorize songs about their observations. Their battle is more or less musical theater. They are the only source of bards in the setting.
Look, those who were considered barbarians in the late Roman Empire eventually grew into the scholars of the middle ages, especially through religious institutions.
I think perhaps a good idea is that even though these are barbarian tribes, their kings and nobles are deeply interested in the intellectual ways of their religious estate, and while not doing war might try reaching this intelectual enlightenment through privete tutoring.
I always recall that quote about when the Frank king, Clovis, was learning about the death of Jesus Christ, told the Bishop that had he been there with his brave franks he would have avenged His wrongs.
have a nice day
What are "Skalds"?
Sage goes in every field.
Pretty much the conclusion that I've come to. Initially I rejected the idea because I was always taught that memorization was an inferior way of doing things, but a bunch of singing scientists doing math and science by remembering poetry is great.
>is great
No, it isn't. Not only is memory unreliable, it'd be a pain in the ass to sing or recite it. How are you gonna sing a nuclear reaction process? It's worthless not just for the flaws like memory or sheer volume of shit that would need to be memorized by one person, but because half of the things you would need to remember and recite is very technical. You're not gonna describe building, nuclear reactions, mathematics, or most of this other stuff by reciting some songs and poems. Not unless you're stone age tier. Anything more than that and you need some advanced language or technical language or math or really just reference works to consult because you can't rely on just some dude to be able to just sing it up.
It has limits, but it's competing with books manually copied by scribes with populations that consider literacy rates of over 25% an accomplishment.
Well the books win then. Just like they did in real life despite our low historical literacy rates. For all the reasons already listed and more.
It's fantasy.
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