Ancient World Review

The Roman Grain Trade

This entire lecture series should play automatically, but if it doesn't, the rest of the series can be found here.

"For all of the glory and grandeur of Ancient Rome, the Roman economy never developed into anything terribly complex compared to modern economies. Ancient Rome was an agrarian and slave based economy whose main concern was feeding the vast number of citizens and legionaries who populated the Mediterranean region. Agriculture and trade dominated Roman economic fortunes, only supplemented by small scale industrial production." Source: "Ancient Roman Economy," United Nations of Roma Victrix.

According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, "The growth of Rome to a city of perhaps 250,000 in the time of the Gracchi and of up to one million under Augustus, far outstripping the productive capacity of her hinterlands, created an unprecedented demand for imported foodstuffs." The regular distribution of "a set monthly ration of grain at a set price for adult male citizen residents" was established by the populari Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, later assassinated for his reforms, and the ration was made free by P. Clodius Pulcher in 58 BC.

The Gracchi brothers were representatives of the lower class who attempted to make reforms benefiting the common people. Both were murdered by the ruling aristocracy for (among other things) their land reforms which would have had a major impact on the patrician's power and incomes. This conflict between the commoners and the rapacious nobility still continues to this day.

The emperor Augustus stabilized the number of residents entitled to the grain dole "at or below 200,000" in 2 BC. "[The] public supply, drawing on the grain paid to the state as rent or tax in Sicily, Africa and (from 30 BC) Egypt, helped the privileged minority who held tickets of entitlement, which could be inherited or sold. But the monthly ration did not meet a family's need for grain, and the tickets did not necessarily go to the poor." (OCD)

"Grain made into bread was, by far, the most important element in the Roman diet." (Wikipedia) In later years the grain dole, known as the Cura Annonae, and the construction of the new Colosseum led to the development of the "bread and circuses" system for controlling (or trying to control) the population of Rome, making the grain supply of Egypt critical to the survival of the city.

Even the state couldn't meet the huge demand for grain in a city the size of Rome, however, and this created all sorts of problems. "State grain met no more than a portion of the city's annual grain needs," according to the OCD.  "The rest had to be supplied by the free market. Furthermore, the importation of the state grain depended upon private traders, who in times of crisis had to be offered considerable incentives to involve themselves in the trade."

The grain supply of Egypt was so crucial that the Roman emperors made sure to keep the country under tight control:

"As a key province, but also the 'crown domain' where the emperors succeeded the divine Pharaohs, Egypt was ruled by a uniquely styled Praefectus augustalis ('Augustal prefect'), instead of the traditional senatorial governor of other Roman provinces. The prefect was a man of equestrian rank and was appointed by the Emperor." (Wikipedia)

If the wrong man was appointed to govern Egypt, he could easily pressure Rome into meeting his demands. I don't think it ever happened in reality, but this scenario was portrayed in HBO's Rome where Marc Antony withholds the grain supply in order to force Octavian into declaring war.

The Old Ways Of Curing Meat

The technique of curing meat with smoke goes back to the Stone Age. For example, the Siberian Times in 2015 reported that archaeologists had discovered a 5,000-year-old smokehouse used for preserving fish:

"Fish was processed by putting it in pits in the red-coloured ground to give it a 'special smell'. The smokehouse was uncovered at Tartas-1 site in Vengerovo district [Siberia?] where experts have been studying burials and other ritual facilities for over 10 years."

"We got more than we deserve and we don't appreciate what we got."

"Food curing dates back to ancient times, both in the form of smoked meat and salt-cured meat." (Wikipedia)

"Several sources describe the salting of meat in the ancient Mediterranean world. Diodore of Sicily in his Bibliotheca historica wrote that the Cosséens [?] in the mountains of Persia salted the flesh of carnivorous animals. Strabo indicates that people at Borsippa were catching bats and salting them to eat. The ancient Greeks prepared tarichos ... which was meat and fish conserved by salt or other means. The Romans called this dish salsamentum – which term later included salted fat, the sauces and spices used for its preparation ... Preserved meats were furthermore a part of religious traditions: resulting meat for offerings to the gods was salted before being given to priests, after which it could be picked up again by the offerer, or even sold in the butcher's."

"Meat was a luxury for most people [in ancient Greece and Rome]," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary. "In classical Athens it was generally eaten only at feasts accompanying religious festivals. Poultry, game, and eggs played a large part in Roman cookery, but there was comparatively little butcher's meat, apart from pork and sometimes veal. Peasants generally kept pigs. Wild birds (partridges, quails, pheasants) were also eaten. The soldiers of the Roman army had a higher standard of living and a more varied diet than the bulk of the population of the Roman empire."

For Stone Age people, butchering and curing the meat from large game animals like mammoths must have been a major communal activity:

"Like their modern relatives, mammoths were quite large. The largest known species reached heights in the region of 4 m (13.1 ft) at the shoulder and weights of up to 8 tonnes (8.8 short tons), while exceptionally large males may have exceeded 12 tonnes (13.2 short tons)." (Wikipedia) Even normal-sized mammoths probably weighed around five tons.

Neolithic hunters did it, though, using little more than stone tools. I imagine a full-grown mammoth could probably feed a group of hunter-gatherers for a long time.

Related: Mammoth Remains Unearthed at Michigan Farm Hint At Ancient Human Butchering.

Prehistoric Humans Preserved Bone Marrow

Interesting video about wilderness survival. The eating bone marrow part starts at 14:32.

"Researchers have uncovered evidence of the storage and delayed consumption of animal bone marrow at Qesem Cave near Tel Aviv. The research provides direct evidence that early Paleolithic people saved animal bones for up to nine weeks before feasting on them inside the cave." Source: Science Daily.

"'... Prehistoric humans brought to the cave selected body parts of the hunted animal carcasses,'" according to one of the professors involved in this study. "'... The most common prey was fallow deer, and limbs and skulls were brought to the cave while the rest of the carcass was stripped of meat and fat at the hunting scene and left there. We found that the deer leg bones, specifically the metapodials, exhibited unique chopping marks on the shafts, which are not characteristic of the marks left from stripping fresh skin to fracture the bone and extract the marrow.' ... The researchers contend that the deer metapodials were kept at the cave covered in skin to facilitate the preservation of marrow for consumption in time of need."

The bottom line here is that prehistoric hunter-gatherers didn't just live hand-to-mouth all the time. They knew they could preserve bone marrow by leaving the bone and skin intact. They were also familiar with preserving meat by freezing and drying.  Still, as shown in the first video above, eating and the search for food must have an ongoing process throughout the day.

First Farmers Were Malnourished Forced Labor?

Video from 2017. Closed-captions helpful.

"Humankind first started farming in Mesopotamia about 11,500 years ago. Subsequently, the practices of cultivating crops and raising livestock emerged independently at perhaps a dozen other places around the world, in what archaeologists call the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. It's one of the most thoroughly-studied episodes in prehistory -- but a new paper in the Journal of Political Economy shows that most explanations for it don't agree with the evidence, and offers a new interpretation." Source: Science Daily.

According to this study, farming, at least in the beginning, was less efficient than hunting:

"'It is very unlikely that the number of calories acquired from a day's work at the advent of farming made it a better option than hunting and gathering and it could well have been quite a bit worse' ... Prior studies, including those of human and animal bones, suggest that farming actually took an extreme nutritional toll on early adopters and their livestock. So why farm in the first place?"

One possibility is that farming was a kind of forced labor imposed on one group by another, but if the first farmers were malnourished slaves then who were their masters?

"Some have suggested an inferior technology could have been imposed by political elites as a strategy for extracting taxes, tribute, or rents. But farming was independently adopted millennia before the emergence of governments or political elites capable of imposing a new way of life on heavily-armed foraging communities."

This theory doesn't require a "political elite," however. A large, strong clan of hunter-gatherers could have easily enslaved a smaller tribe and forced them to do farm work. That's a perfectly plausible scenario and I wouldn't be surprised if it actually happened at different times and places, but saying that this is how the Neolithic Revolution started is a completely different matter.

The agricultural revolution couldn't have started this way. The problem is that these hunter-gatherers must have already known how to farm before they could force another clan to do it for them.

Otzi The Iceman's Last Meal: Fat, Wild Meat, Cereals

"In 1991, German tourists discovered, in the Eastern Italian Alps, a human body that was later determined to be the oldest naturally preserved ice mummy, known as Otzi or the Iceman. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology who have conducted the first in-depth analysis of the Iceman's stomach contents offer a rare glimpse of our ancestor's ancient dietary habits. Among other things, their findings show that the Iceman's last meal was heavy on the fat." Source: Archaeology News Network (2018).

Otzi was once thought to have been a vegetarian or mostly vegetarian, but this latest study confirms that he was omnivorous with "a remarkably high proportion of fat in his diet, supplemented with wild meat from ibex [a kind of goat] and red deer, cereals from einkorn [a type of wheat which grows wild ... see next video], and with traces of toxic bracken [a kind of fern]..."

Processing flour from einkorn wheat.

Comment: The claim that early humans were primarily vegetarians is false. People have been hunting the ibex, just to name one example of a prehistoric meat source, for thousands of years:

"Evidence of the ibex is widely present in the archaeological record, particularly in the Near East and Mediterranean regions. Ibex motifs are very common on cylinder seals and pottery, both painted and embossed. Excavations from Minoan Crete at Knossos, for example, have yielded specimens from about 1800 BC, including one cylinder seal depicting an ibex defending himself from a hunting dog ... An Iron Age Capra ibex specimen was recovered at the Aq Kupruk Archaeological site in present day Afghanistan, illustrating either domestication or hunting of the ibex by these early peoples." (Wikipedia)

Otzi the Iceman must have been a skilled hunter to bring down a wild mountain goat with a Stone Age bow. The ibex is still being hunted today, but our tools have improved dramatically.

Alcohol & Drugs: Not Just For Modern Humans

"Unlike most modern humans, the prehistoric people of Europe did not use mind-altering substances simply for their hedonistic pleasure. Researchers contend that their use was an integral part of prehistoric beliefs, and that these substances were seen to aid in communication with the spiritual world." Source: Science Daily (2014)

Comment: Modern stoners have written a lot of entertaining gibberish about the prehistoric use of psychedelic plants. Take the Stoned Ape Theory, for instance. According to "psychonauts" like the late Terence McKenna, the evolution of the human mind was kickstarted by the use of hallucinogens, but it's hard to see how this could have happened.

It's possible, I suppose, that psychedelic mushrooms and the like could have activated new receptors in the brain (or something like that), but even if these neurological changes had been permanent, would they have been passed down genetically? Even if they were, a lot of people must have been effected for the nature of the human mind itself to be altered in any meaningful way.

As far as I know, the use of hallucinogenic plants in prehistoric times was basically limited to shamans and small groups in strictly religious contexts, so it doesn't seem likely that their chemically-induced brain mutations -- if they actually occurred -- would have been passed down in sufficient numbers to alter the consciousness of an entire species.

How People Prepared Food In Prehistoric Times

Hadza hunting & food preparation. Video from 2017.

"The way that traditional hunter-gatherers roasted tubers can shed new light on how people prepared food in prehistoric times. Archaeologist Stephanie Schnorr has studied the food preparation culture of the Hadza in Tanzania." Source: Science Daily (2016).

Note: The Hadza people appear to have existed in a state of almost total social stasis for millennia. According to Wikipedia, their "ancestors have probably lived in their current territory for tens of thousands of years. Hadzaland is just 50 kilometres (31 mi) from Olduvai Gorge, an area sometimes called the 'Cradle of Mankind' because of the number of hominin fossils found there, and 40 kilometres (25 mi) from the prehistoric site of Laetoli. Archaeological evidence suggests that the area has been continuously occupied by hunter gatherers much like the Hadza since at least the beginning of the Later Stone Age, 50,000 years ago."

"Roasting tubers could be a good model for early forms of food preparation, according to Schnorr. 'If this method allows the Hadza to live and flourish on the East African savannah, I think it is safe to assume that early groups of humans, and possibly also early species of the genus Homo, also relied on this method.'" (Science Daily)

Eating Your Babies Is A Form Of Parental Care

Blue crabs love baby blue crabs.

"Why do some animals eat or abandon their offspring? According to researchers, these might actually be forms of parental care. Their mathematical model shows that when overcrowding threatens offspring survival -- which often occurs due to spread of infection or competition for resources -- sacrificing a few so the most can live becomes the ultimate form of tough love." Source: Science Daily.

Tough love. That's hilarious. Only an academic could argue with a straight face that eating your own children is a form of "parental care." Don't get me wrong, though. I can think of lots of good reasons for eating your own babies. Maybe you can't afford the quarter-of-a-million dollars it will cost to raise that cute little rug rat to the age of eighteen, or maybe you just want to stop their incessant babbling and howling.

This baby looks particularly tasty.

Another good reason to eat babies is to save the planet from the global warming crisis. As we all know, the world will end in a few months if we don't immediately dismantle our advanced industrial societies and drastically reduce the population.

The best reason to eat babies, though, is hunger. Jonathan Swift, the famous Anglo-Irish gourmet, pointed out that plump human babies around a year old are particularly succulent and nutritious:

"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled; and, I make no doubt, that it would equally serve in a Fricasie, or Ragoust." -- Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729)

Swift didn't mention it specifically, but babies are also very tasty when they're barbecued.

Related: The History of Barbecue.

Giant Prehistoric Bird Ate Neanderthal Child's Bones

"One Neanderthal child had a very bad day about 115,000 years ago. The child died — that much is certain — and the bones were gulped down and digested by a giant, prehistoric bird, according to archaeologists in Poland." Source: Live Science (2018).

"However, it's unclear whether the giant bird killed the child before the gruesome feast or whether the child died from another cause before the bird scavenged the remains, the archaeologists said."

Note: The bones, discovered in Ciemna Cave, one of several caves in Ojcow National Park in Poland, are "the oldest known human remains ever to be found in Poland." The bird that ate the child's bones isn't identified, which is too bad. I've got this picture of a Neanderthal kid wandering off from its cave and getting gobbled up by a huge terror bird, but the terror birds, unfortunately, lived in South America during a different time period.

Related: 10 Dangerous Prehistoric Birds.

First Human Ancestors Breastfed For Longer Than Contemporary Relatives

Video from 2012.

"By analyzing the fossilized teeth of some of our most ancient ancestors, scientists have discovered that the first humans significantly breastfed their infants for longer periods than their contemporary relatives." Source: Science Daily.

"... By reconstructing the age at tooth enamel development, they show that early Homo offspring was breastfed in significant proportions until the age of around three to four years, which likely played a role in the apparition of traits that are specific to human lineage, such as brain development."

Note: Breastfeeding can also have a major effect on your size and strength, if you believe Game of Thrones. The following is one of the few good scenes in the train wreck of Season 8.

This recent study is presumably more accurate than making comparisons with chimps and so on:

"The team sampled minute amounts from nearly 40 fossilised teeth of our South African fossil relatives, early Homo, Paranthropus robustus and Australopithecus africanus ... They measured the proportions of their stable calcium isotopes in the tooth enamel, which are a function of the mother milk intake by infants."

These days new mothers usually breastfeed for around six months or so. I guess. This is all very interesting, but what I'd really like to know is when and how breastfeeding became a sexual fetish,