Where the Romans Fought (interactive map)
iosiflazaridis.github.io
iosiflazaridis.github.io
This is technically "clear", because each clause is declarative, and states a fact. But it's unreadable because there's no rhythm, transitions or structure, which leaves a human reader's eyes glazing over.
You insist too much on the fact that you are "human". What a time to be alive.
The problems are obvious. The OP is not even toning down the 100 window height's worth of battle tabular data, it's pretty clear that OP just pulled the output from a simple claude code output without any taste or editorialization.
So I think it's pretty constructive. This is a cool map, I thought of doing something similar myself (for Alexander's conquest). It just needs to be de-slopped.
I claim no great historical authority here but, since I grew up mostly within sight of the hillfort, we were taught about its history at school to an extent that, at the time, felt unrelenting, cruelly repetitive, and utterly tedious. In reality though, it probably lasted for a single term at the fag end of 1985 when we learned about the Celts[0].
But what we learned was that General Vespasian captured Maiden Castle after a brutal one day battle in AD 43 in which Maiden Castle’s Celtic defenders were slaughtered in what amounted to a one-sided rout due to the superior weapons, tactics, and discipline of the Romans. This is what I remembered, but I wanted to look it up to ensure my facts were straight.
Welp… TIL because subsequent investigation and analysis has shown that it didn’t happen at all so, no, dear reader, my “facts” were not straight.
There never was any big battle.
There might have been the odd smaller skirmish during the Roman period, but the bodies we found that were all supposed to have died in the big battle actually span several generations, dying at different times over a period of a couple of hundred years, and the evidence of violence in their deaths was in the vast majority of cases inter-tribal and occurred before the Romans even showed up.
Maiden Castle had already fallen into decline by the time the Romans arrived and was mostly abandoned for a long period until a temple (that you can still visit the ruins of) was built early in the 4th century.
So the reason the battle of Maiden Castle doesn’t appear on the site isn’t because the site is carelessly built AI-slop but because no such battle ever happened.
I have been… disillusioned. Hats off to the human behind the AI that built the site.
[0] I remember this with such precision because it was the first period of history we learned about at middle school, and matters didn’t improve significantly, because next it was the domestic matters of the bleeding Victorians, and lots of episodes of “How we used to live”.
congrats and thank you for the detailed post!
It does sound like the counter-stance is mainly also the view of one person, Dr Miles Russell at Bournemouth Uni. But from bits I've read before, Sir Mortimer Wheeler was from the same era as Sir Arthur Evans, that time when they enjoyed absolute authority and could not be challenged. That meant their mistakes, and even deliberate lies, had to be considered to be 100% known fact and would not be corrected until after their deaths.
And if they died at different times, especially when most of them died before the Romans arrived, then the whole big battle theory just sort of falls apart from there.
I think with AI we'll see a lot more of these little data viz projects that look good on machines like the one they were developed on, with little care for other devices.
Its not so bad. Before AI this information might not be even this accessible.
My only frustration is that AI use is not acknowledged or clearly described, and that sources are not linked to translation/edition/pages. That would have been appreciated.
the second result is the play button that plays the map.
"1480"is like calling the Iraq war a British Empire endeavour imo.
So, no, it's not at all like calling the Iraq war a British Empire endeavour.
It was our own much later civilisation that made the historical distinction between the older East and West combined "Roman Empire" and its continuation in the East (and sometimes in the West) post ~476 AD ("Byzantine Empire"). The Romans themselves never saw the distinction.
An empire is an ideology which emanates from a seat of power. Byzantium != Rome. It's different in multiple ways.
People call themselves European all over European. It doesn't mean Spain = Portugal. It's a larp.
The issue is that you are viewing a single entity differently, because of a hack in the way history was taught, biased by a Western Catholic church-based perspective.
The nature of being Roman changed from the early days of Rome to the final fall of the last remaining bastions in Crimea in the 1470s, of course. But the Republic was different to the early Empire, was different to the Empire in the 3rd century, was very different to the Empire in the 4th century, was different again to the Empire in the 6th century, was different to the Empire in the 9th and 10th centuries, etc, etc.
But that's no different to me pointing out that the way people thought and lived and worked in the United States in the late eighteenth century was very different to how they live now in the 21st century. But we still consider these people to be American.
Yes, not from a fixed physical location. If the empire fell when rome ceased to be "the seat of power" it was no longer the Roman empire by ~300 AD was it? Diocletian was larping...
The Roman empire continiously changed and evolved. The empire in ~300 AD wouldn't have made any sense to Romans from 100 BC (and probably a lot more sense to the Romans from 1000 AD)
"with several scholars identifying the "Dmitry", one of the three Golden Horde princes in the Battle of Blue Waters (c. 1362/1363), with a Prince of Gothia."
[sorry, I'm old school. I still Wikipedia is a damn good single source of truth]