Reddit reviews Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe

My study on the latest scholarship is out of date and this field can change dramatically with a few digs or discovery of a lost primary source, but I'll give you what I have picked up from studying ancient history as a tertiary focus area.

Civilization needs food surplus in order to feed people who do not produce food. Rivers are great ways of doing this since their banks tend to be nutrient rich and they are a constant source of water. Herodotus reported that the grains grown in Mesopotamia along the rivers were much more productive than anywhere else, but take what he says with a grain of salt.

As we can see with the constant migration of peoples into Mesopotamia and the Indus valley and even Egypt after the end of the old kingdom, many people were attracted to this abundance and material wealth and moved in. Some just passed through and those on the edge of the power zone of those civilizations tried to copy them.

A book called Empires and Barbarians: the fall of the Roman empire and the birth of europe (http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Barbarians-Fall-Birth-Europe/dp/0199892261) Peter Hether describes how the romans used diplomacy and bribes to control the peoples on their boarders and how that caused those people to adopt new ways of organizing. I asked people who studied china and I got the impression that a similar thing happened in the east too.

As Northern Europe is colder than Mediterranean Europe, and the soil thicker, new technologies had to be developed to establish civilization up there. But once those were achieved, we get England, Norway, and Germany.

>Actually they are.

No, the are not. There is no meaning use of Semitic to refer to people.

>The Semitic language family is well-defined and yes,

The language family. Language similarity does not tell you about ethnicity or genetics.

> Yes, language does not always correlate with heritage but in the case of Arabs and Jews, it is.

Try this again. Arabs and Jews have a common history, that does not make them Semites. And in fact Palestinians and Syrians have a genetic relationship that makes them closer to Jews than either are to Egyptians or Saudis. Arab is a linguistic cultural group (and the culture connection is weak and mostly mediated through the religion). But that a sub-set of Arabs and Jews share a history does not mean that Jews and Arabs form a group nor does it mean that it makes sense to call them Semites.

>There is more than enough population genetic papers on that, sorry, too busy to find a specific reference.

Moroccans (Saudis, Kuwaitis) are Arabs, they are not particularly genetically related to Jews. The Arabic language spread with Islam in the 7th-9th centuries. Language and religion spread but genetics not so much. While it is about Europe you might want to read Empires and Barbarians. Our received history is that waves of invasions and peoples move across Europe and the Middle East. Turns out languages and social systems move, people no so much.

Reading Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe at the moment.

Pre-1960 consensus was that emigration and immigration was the end-all/be-all for the creation of european identities(Celts, Germanic, etc tribes moving about)

Post-1960 consensus is that migration was embellished and that technological, cultural, and political developments are more core catalysts for the identity.

Not too far in(I've just got to Chapter 3), but he takes the middle ground.