I've recently become fascinated by the Thracians,what can /his/ tell me about them other than the fact that they were /fa/ as fuck?
>pic related, dem cloaks
>>1061606
dat shield
>:3
>>1062202
Seem like they were pretty shit warriors.
>>1062227
Tell that to Gaius Claudius Glaber
They were different tribes, fighting with each other most of the time. Never actually united to be a scary force (Odryssian kingdom was a ruse). However, they were good mercenaries - Alexander's army was around 30% Thracians, later romans also used them effectively.
t. guy from a 2500 year old thracian village
>>1061606
aren't they basically estranged greeks with a scythian-esque lifestyle?
>>1063122
They were their own Indo-European branch, their language was also more like Slavic and Iranic than Greek.
Wasted potential
If only they stopped squabbling
>>1063132
well it's grouped under "balkan" along with hellenic, nowhere near slavic or iranic, so i don't see how that's possible
creepy ass crackas
>>1063132
Probably similair to modern day Albanian, which is descended from Illyrian. Obviously "similair" is meant loosely.
Source: Malcolm "Kosovo: A Short History"
I thought Xenophanes said the Thracians had fair hair
>>1065820
Spoiler alert: the Greeks said everyone had fair hair, because they were comparing them to Greeks
>>1065820
Greeks were pretty olive-skinned and dark haired in general, so just by that notion most others are fair compared to them. Even the Italians and Latins, like the Romans, but they were still pretty tanned themselves.
>>1063133
>Wasted potential
>If only they stopped squabbling
history of the balkans desu
>>1066627
>tfw a balkan tribe actually managed to call to arms other balkan tribes and loot and pillage Macedon
>tfw there will never be another king Bardyllis who will pillage and rape between Epyrus and Macedon
>tfw Illyrians are no more the threatening sea pirates of the past but just Mercedes carjackers and just generic trash
Pic unrelated to the culture but related to how shit I feel
>>1066593
then explain this
>>1065820
The Greeks and Romans called ALL foreigners to the north redheads
They didn't get out much
>>1061606
The idea of the city was foreign to them. The area has always had fortified settlements, but a settlement with a central and distributive functions was something quite new. My opinion is their way of life, their culture did not really require such a settlement pattern. The first cities, excluding the Greek apoikia on Black sea, founded in mid 7th century, were build by Phillip II while on his conquering expedition against the Scythians in 342 BCE; Philippopolis and Kabyle were most likely founded by him.
Later, last quarter of the 4th century BCE, you have local kingdoms such as the one of Seuthes III and the Getic one. The rise of a central power required a central settlement, a capital. Seuthes built his Seuthopolis according to Hippodam's orthogonal plan, with an agora and walls of stone basis and mudbricks upper part. The influence of the southern fortification tradition is obvious.
The historical sources on this early Thracian period are scarce.
>>1067005
balkan federation when?
>>1069318
>>1069318
undercoat, it wouldn't really be that gaudy, it would look almost like a lifelike wax figure, which is ironic considering how statues bleached white by time are kind of like how modern art likes to put a variation on a theme of classical art
>>1069434
thats about the average pigmentation of a british or german male. Whatever the case may be, italians don't look like that anymore
>>1069461
Source?
>>1062227
They were pretty shit warriors on their own
>>1065820
Red-headed and blue eyed
>>1069318
These are so terribly painted. The artist clearly has no idea about shading, he hasn't even done a basic shade wash.
>>1069318
This is like the paintjob on minifigs painted by chinese children
>>1069461
>Italians don't look like that anymore
Yeah, they're much whiter.
Pic related, a sicilian.
>>1069532
use your eyes, thats just the average skin tone of a northern european
>>1070792
But Annon, I did use my eyes when I were in Italy. Everyone there looks like Blue eyed Aryans from Sweden. that is until you start going south, where they gets a somewhat darker skin tone.
Pic related is a Sicilian farmer.
>>1069400
It wouldn't work, Yugoslavia failed after Tito died and not just because everyone but Serbia wanted to get rid of the communist economic system and serbian hegemony. There's too much hate among each other for too many petty and non-petty secular reasons. I personally have nothing against Serbians but I'd rather not take any chances by trying not to meet any of them in person, or at least not tell them who I actually am.
t. an albanian living in Italy
>>1070806
>"But Annon"
>"when I were"
>"That is" with a lower-case initial
"where they gets"
>Not even changing the filename to properly fool people
Nice meme, although you're partially right in one thing: in the south, many african and middle eastern clandestine immigrants are hired as underpayed farm workers and basically treated like shit.
In Sicily you're likely to get skintones that range from lightly-tanned, typical of the northern shores of the mediterranean, to saracen-moorish brown (along with black hair and dark brown eyes) and even blue-eyed blondies from medieval norman occupation.
Same goes for Campania, Apulia and basically the whole south of Italy, a portion of them is way more tanned compared to northern italians (whom are partially related to the gothic and langobard invaders in early medieval history), but not as tanned or barely as tanned as berbers or basically anyone on the african shore of the mediterranean.
Southern Italy has basically /v/'s and /a/'s concept of "delicious brown girls", but many of them are either chubby, fat or just somewhat meaty/thick (although the last ones can get gigantic longtits, in case anyone cares), and many of them are dumb or pretentious as far as I can tell in what little I know about their personality.
>>1062256
>>1071618
This, basically.
Southern Italians have darker skin because instead of immigrants coming in from the north in the 5th into the 8th century A.D., they received a huge amount of slaves working noble estates from Africa, Greece, Syria and Judaea from the fall of Carthage to the fall of Jerusalem.
And if you want to go back even further, much of northern Italy was dominated by Celts pre-Rome.
>>1071687
source: your ass
>>1071618
>Anon cares this much about my retarded grammar
>>1071687
Mind if I ask if you know why people bring the import of those slaves as a reason why the Italian race began degenerate? Most of those slaves would have come from other high standing civilizations, like Egypt and Carthage, so I don't quite understand how they would have lowered the quality of the Italian race.
>>1069545
It's not actually supposed to look good. It was an attempted reconstruction based on microscopic paint residue or something. As has been pointed out, all you can restore is the undercoat. So everything looks gaudy and unfinished.
>>1071723
Source: Literally any Roman historian.
Post-Carthage it became cheaper for Roman land owners in Sicily and Southern Italy to buy a bunch of Carthaginian slaves rather than employ native Italians. This lead to massive social unrest in the 2nd century B.C., as the unemployed Italians flooded Rome and the new slaves, well, were slaves.
>>1071734
Because people on /pol/ are idiots who don't understand things.
And there were a lot of Jewish slaves, too. The last major influx of slaves into the Roman markets followed Jewish rebellions.
>>1071761
And how did this affect the ethnic composition of Southern Italy at all?
>>1071812
>and how did this effect the ethnic composition of southern Italy at all?
Before, people were primarily a mixture of Oscans, Samnites and Greeks, people who in one form or another came from the Balkans. Afterwards, there were a bunch of people of Middle Eastern and North African descent.
>>1071848
Dubious claims at best
>>1071761
>buy a bunch of Carthaginian slaves rather than employ native Italians
They took 50,000 captive at Carthage. The VAST majority of Carthaginians died.
They wouldn't be a drop in the bucket even if all of them went to Sicily.
And they didn't, because sources make it clear that they were scattered all over as policy.
>>1071687
>>1071761
>>1071769
That's basically it, plus throughout history post-roman southern Italy has seen saracen and norman invasions as I said, but also the Borbones, a spanish-influenced regency.
To be fair, italians are a mixture of cultures among germanic and norse (gothic, langobard, norman), italic and greek too. More over, even in ancient Rome, before the Punic Wars when Rome had conquered all of the peninsula, the latins were only a small portion among etruscans, sabellics, greeks and celts, which by that time were either annexed/romanized, subjugated but still non-roman or even allied (the so-called Socii). Later on Italy would be known as 100% roman, but in fact the "pure-blooded" romans were either the natives of Latium or the families of retired veterans with their families who had gotten a small portion of land in a given part of the peninsula.
To put it simply, modern italians are far from the pure roman race that fascism or dumb italians may tell you. They never were even when the romans controlled the whole of Italy since the other cultures in the area don't just suddenly become roman, no matter how many temples you convert or how many portions of their cities you rebuild with roman architecture.
>>1071734
I care more about the faceless people in this website like you than the dumb, unfunny and uninteresting people I know in real life and have to deal with on a daily basis.
Also the degeneration of the italian race would've come after the fall of the empire: racemixing with the germanic invaders, a religion controlling the daily life of its people with an iron fist and the division among the many italian cultures populating the peninsula; ancient Rome had unified a myriad of italic warring tribes and peoples under its control and managed to nullify their diversities by romanizing them and giving them. Barbarian invasions would make Italy a weak area only worth conquering by other nations like France, Spain and Germany.
>gif unrelated
>>1071896
>>1072025
He is somewhat right in the part about the balkans. The Messapii were a bunch of illyrian tribes who had settled in the area around Apulia. Along with the Sabellic/Samnitic and Oscan natives plus the greek colonies, these illyrians would become one of the ethnic groups in southern Italy.
He may be wrong about slaves having an impact on the population's ethnicity and the fact that they were employed mostly in southern Italy, but it's still true that roman Italy was not made of a single ethnic group to begin with and by the time it was fully romanized, germanic invasions had already begun.
>buy a bunch of Carthaginian slaves rather than employ native Italians
It's more profitable for latifondist patricians to employ rights-lacking slaves than legit workers. Why do you think modern companies relocate their enterprises in 3rd world countries? Low-cost labour is their only option in a world where slavery has been almost completely abolished, as employing citizens from their own countries implies higher costs due to our rights as workers and free citizens. Italy does the same but with clandestine immigrants, offering them underpayed jobs "in nero", which means "without the knowledge of the census", so it's not taxed and the worker can't do a thing about it since he has no documents and going to the authorities is likely to send him back from where he came.
>>1072029
While the Barbarians did cause a lot of damage against the Roman empire's provinces, Italy itself remained mostly functioning during the rule of the Ostrogoths. It wasn't really until the strife following the death of Theodoric the great and the Gothic wars against Byzantium that Italy was raped into the mess it would later become.
I may be wrong, though I am pretty sure the rather rapid events of Theodoric dies>Civil strife>Byzantine invasion>Gothic Rebellion>Lombard Invasion did a lot to ruin the peninsula for some time.
Crushing the existing kingdom to incorporate it into the Holy Roman empire which then failed to keep any strong central rule over Italy Should have done its part as well.
Maybe I am just spewing bullshit?
>>1072077
I'm not an expert in all of this myself, so take my words >>1071618 >>1072029 >>1072071 with a grain of salt. As far as I can tell, those events are also part of what caused Italy to be the shithole it is now. Aside from medieval invasions, the reason it is very weak nowadays is because it developed an industrial economy much later compared to the other european powers, an that happened because Italy had been divided in several warring tiny states and/or subdued by foreign countries several times. After Rome fell, Italy was too weak to recover in time and reunify before any foreign force would come and take their piece of the pizza-cake, they simply never had the time to
>become great again
between invasions.
Compared to Germany and France, Italy had it's cultural differences from region to region so it was difficult to remain united, while the teutos and the baguettes-du-garage were fairly similar in terms of culture. Therefore Italy remained a mainly-agricultural area for most of its time.
>>1072130
I think you are overplaying Italy's problems a bit. Germany and France to used to have quite big regional differences between the dialects and identities, Germany's getting worse from the big split in Religion. Italy did also manage to have a bigger GNP than the UK for a while, so they aren't that bad off.
Their main problem I would say is that they unlike France and Germany didn't quite manage to create themselves a good national identity as well as the Mafia. While the southern parts of Italy did manage to stay rich for quite a while mismanagement, lack of efficient rule and stuff allowed for the Italian mafia to grow strong which must have done its part in curbing the rise of the Italian south. Suppose they got even more fucked during the last war when the Yankees installed Maffios as local governors when they advanced through Italy.
Also, on behalf of the many Invasions, I am fairly certain they did decrease quite a lot after the Hasburg-French wars when it was clear the Hasburgs were the big winners in Italy. After that Germany was hit much harder than Italy ever was due to the thirty years war ((Armageddon in mini format))
Of course, I am no expert and if anything of this seems fishy I would be glad if you or anyone else points it out.
