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comment by Quatrarius

i disagree with the assertion that it never had much going on, given that it was rome's breadbasket and rich as hell for quite a while after the time you discussed - i think if you're gonna point to the romans fucking up the coast you should point to deforestation and not to the whole "salting the earth" thing - sure, they fucked up the city for a while, but it rebounded into a bigass metropolis and only really lost relevance after getting bounced back and forth between rebels, vandals, eastern romans, and arabs for like 400 years

libya wasn't just cyrene: there was a lot of shit in roman africa and i think it's not correct to characterize north africa-west-of-egypt as "the greeks' sloppy seconds" and punic ruins. a bunch of important stuff happened in between "rome moves in" and "everything is islam" and if things turned out a bit differently it sure as hell could have "had a chance", or at least could have declined a lot slower

also north africa was like. extremely important in the spread of christianity and popped out more bishops and heresies than anybody knew what to do with so it's like even culturally speaking it's not like it was a backwater given that saint mutherfuckin augustine was the bishop of HIPPO

i dunno man. i don't disagree with the first half of your post (old historians are lying bastards at the best of times and it's a dangerous game living in the desert), but i deeply disagree with your conclusion and i think it's an unhelpful oversimplification

silphium is neat as hell, i agree with that - i would watch the hell out of that movie too





kleinbl00  ·  1779 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Look - we started talking about the permanence of the Sahara and ended up at the historical origins of native Libyans. I've done my level best to keep up and keep pointed in the direction you wanna take this but I also wanna point out that while we're talking your passion?

I'm just pointing out that the Sahara is an old desert.

Quatrarius  ·  1779 days ago  ·  link  ·  

hey I'm not trying to be a dick about it, it's that i want to clarify some things that i actually have knowledge about / want to contribute to discussion on here for once instead of floating around complaining about my life like i normally do - I'm sorry for breathing down your neck, i didn't intend it

at the same time if i was saying smth inaccurate about sound design or moviemaking or watches or etc the things you know a lot about, i would want to be corrected / for people who know more to come in and share because I'm an ignorant person generally so it's like, i thought i could share some stuff that i thought was interesting

so i apologize for using your comments to jump off on rambling / making you need to 'keep up with' a discussion that doesn't interest you: next time I'll just comment on the main body of the post to avoid this kind of thing i guess

user-inactivated  ·  1779 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    next time I'll just comment on the main body of the post to avoid this kind of thing i guess

Please don't and please keep being you. This is stuff I like hearing about, especially culture and language and religion and art. So if you have interesting side tangents, I'd love to hear them.