[HN Gopher] Roman Egypt was a strange province
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Roman Egypt was a strange province
Author : picture
Score : 122 points
Date : 2022-12-02 16:46 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _most of the country is desert_
|
| Well, in the manner of speaking only. Back in the day, the
| "country" was where people had settlements, and that was the
| delta and the banks of the Nile...
| agumonkey wrote:
| There's a video about Florida in the early days of USA and it
| was mostly a swamp. The last century made it into a state per
| se but it's really recent.
| justinator wrote:
| Deswampifying Florida is one of the greatest environmental
| tragedies ever committed. Up there with the building of the
| Glen Canyon and Hoover Dam. Shortly below is attempting to
| control the Mississippi River Delta.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| All the hundreds of dams out west built to irrigate high
| and cold interior deserts really. Each individually
| unjustifiable environmental destruction, all together a
| catastrophe. They'll outlast everything else we build and
| probably even the memory of the name of this country
| itself.
| paganel wrote:
| The Soviets thinking about reversing the flow direction of
| some big Siberian rivers (from South to North into North to
| South) might have topped them all, if the project had
| actually been executed. [1]
|
| Of course, the same Soviets copied the American
| capitalists's hydro policy, starting with Stalin and
| continuing with Khrushchev, with the same negative
| environmental effects. The Volga Hydroelectric Station
| project [2] was used as an accusation against Khrushchev by
| some and said accusation was used for its dismissal,
| supposedly for the project's negative effects, mainly the
| huge swathes of very productive agricultural lands which
| got submerged.
|
| Modern-day Egypt has done the same thing with the Aswan
| Dam.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Hydroelectric_Station
| debacle wrote:
| The problem is the land owners who didn't see it as a
| tragedy are still the ones pulling the strings. Florida is
| on borrowed time.
| hammock wrote:
| What's the relevance of your comment to its parent?
| agumonkey wrote:
| How we perceive space today is not how it was long ago.
| somat wrote:
| yes, however, having a river does not make the area something
| other than a desert.
| mkehrt wrote:
| If you read the rest of the paragraph, you'll see that he's
| talking about aridness being important for preserving papyri.
| hammock wrote:
| Thanks for this necessary context. Roman Egypt did not share
| the same borders of what we think of as modern Egypt as today.
|
| AD 125:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Ro...
| ggm wrote:
| I wonder if the existence of a stable overclass of alexandrines
| distinct from the native population pre-prepared Egypt to be a
| Roman vassal state: it was already functioning as an analogous
| model, they just replaced the top set, but kept the governance
| model as-is.
|
| Egypt was a breadbasket for Rome long before it was incorporated
| as were Tunisia and Sicily. I suspect "do not break the supply
| chain" was huge in not altering the governance
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I seem to hear conflicting reports on whether invest in Greek
| Egypt (up to Cleopatra) was practiced mainly by the Greeks or by
| the Egyptians to thumb their nose at the Greeks.
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