wynalazki: Ancient Rome

Evidence: 32 • authority: 88

Ancient States, Empires, and Exploitation. Abstract The rise and fall of ancient empires and states has been a popular theme in comparative social and political history for many years, yet we still find the whole process fascinating—perhaps because, in the modern world, notions of the “end of history” and “imperial overstretch” have raised questions about whether decline and fall affect the modern Western world as well as the past. Yet beyond such simple slogans lies a deeper truth: the dynamics of historical social change remain problematic because there are no simple answers to the question “Why did such- and-such an empire rise when it did, and why did it collapse or succumb to external…

Evidence: 24 • authority: 72

Several empires in human history have been contenders for the largest of all time, depending on definition and mode of measurement. Possible ways of measuring size include area, population, economy, and power. Of these, area is the most commonly used because it has a relatively precise definition and can be feasibly measured with some degree of accuracy; nevertheless, even area is limited in this regard because of the difficulty in defining the boundaries of empires due to things like the indirect nature of imperial control and sparsely inhabited or even uninhabited areas that may nominally have been controlled by an empire but not meaningfully ruled by it. Estonian political scientist Rein…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Achaemenid Empire (, ə-KEE-mə-nid; Old Persian: 𐎧𐏁𐏂, Xšāça, lit. 'The Empire' or 'The Kingdom') was an ancient Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty in 550 BC. At peak, its territorial extent was roughly 5.5 million square kilometres (2.1 million square miles), making it the largest empire of its time. Based in the Iranian plateau, it stretched from the Balkans and Cyrenaica in the west to the Indus Valley in the east, including Anatolia, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, the Levant, the South Caucasus, parts of Eastern Arabia, and large parts of Central Asia. By the 7th century BC, the region of Persis, located in the southwestern part of the Iranian plateau, had be…

Evidence: — • authority: 88

The Roman Empire: The Principate,. Abstract The end of the Republic and its replacement by ‘the Empire’ is con ventionally ascribed either to 31 BC or to 27 BC. The first date refers to the Battle of Actium by which Octavian, the adopted nephew of Caesar, became the de facto ruler of the Roman world, the second to the constitu tional settlement in which he came to be addressed as princeps, that is, ‘First Man in the State’-hence the term ‘Principate’ to express the nature of the new regime. For two centuries it flourished, but during the third century AD it was badly shaken by barbarian pressure without and civil convulsion within, and after the accession of Diocletian in 284 the appa ratus…

Evidence: — • authority: 92

A comparison of income inequality in the Roman and Chinese Han empires.. The emergence of vast territorial empires is a recurring development in the history of human civilization. Their ability to extract resources from their subjects, and to redistribute them, also increases the potential of higher levels of economic inequality. Here we explore how imperial structures contributed to set the level of inequality in two ancient empires, the Roman Empire ca. 165 CE and the Chinese Han Empire ca. 2 CE. We estimate the overall levels of imperial inequality as the combination of inequality between and within regions. We find that the Han Empire was, overall, more unequal and extractive than the R…

Evidence: — • authority: 65