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Romans invented Swiss army knife 2000 years ago.

Tedminator

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huh. learn something new everyday...

swiss-army_knife_1764274b.jpg


Romans invented 'Swiss army knife' 2,000 years ago - Telegraph
A 2000-year-old tool that has gone on display in a Cambridge museum has been taken as proof that the Romans invented the Swiss army knife.

17 Nov 2010
The Roman version of the famous multi-purpose tool includes a spoon, knife, three pronged fork, spike and even what looks like a toothpick. At only 15cm long it would have fitted easily into the pocket of a discerning diner and is easy to clean and sharpen thanks to the silver and iron used to make it. The Roman eating implement has been estimated to date from between 201 to 300 AD and originates from the Mediterranean region of Europe. The tool is currently on display for the first time at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Lucy Theobald, a spokesperson for the museum, said: "It's believed to be an example of a Roman 'Swiss army knife' - a silver implement with a knife, spoon, fork, a spike for extracting meat from snails, and a spatula, which is believed to have been used for poking sauce out of narrow-necked bottles." Experts believed the device, which was found in the Mediterranean, would have been used by a well-off traveller.
 
Cool tidbit of info, thanks.

I think it's weird that they call it a Swiss army knife though, when that's a brand name from Switzerland. Can't they just call it a multi-purpose knife like every other knife company does?
 
OOooooo Roman legionaires vs Chinese infantry vs Hun horsemen... this calls for a TotalWar mod.




Chinese villagers 'descended from Roman soldiers' - Telegraph
Thursday 25 November 2010
Genetic testing of villagers in a remote part of China has shown that nearly two thirds of their DNA is of Caucasian origin, lending support to the theory that they may be descended from a 'lost legion' of Roman soldiers.

..snips..

Archeologists plan to conduct digs in the region, along the ancient Silk Route, to search for remains of forts or other structures built by the fabled army. "We hope to prove the legend by digging and discovering more evidence of China's early contacts with the Roman Empire," Yuan Honggeng, the head of a newly-established Italian Studies Centre at Lanzhou University in Gansu province, told the China Daily newspaper.

The genetic tests have leant weight to the theory that Roman legionaries settled in the area in the first century BC after fleeing a disastrous battle. The clash took place in 53BC between an army led by Marcus Crassus, a Roman general, and a larger force of Parthians, from what is now Iran, bringing to an abrupt halt the Roman Empire's eastwards expansion. Thousands of Romans were slaughtered and Crassus himself was beheaded, but some legionaries were said to have escaped the fighting and marched east to elude the enemy.

They supposedly fought as mercenaries in a war between the Huns and the Chinese in 36BC – Chinese chroniclers refer to the capture of a "fish-scale formation" of troops, a possible reference to the "tortoise" phalanx formation perfected by legionnaries. The wandering Roman soldiers are thought to have been released and to have settled on the steppes of western China.
 
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More on the theory that was first put forward in the 1950s by Homer Dubs..

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Romans in China?
This idea was first proposed by Homer Hasenphlug Dubs, an Oxford University professor of Chinese history, who speculated in 1955 that some of the 10,000 Roman prisoners taken by the Parthians after the battle of Carrhae in southeastern Turkey in 53 B.C. made their way east to Uzbekistan to enlist with Jzh Jzh against the Han. Chinese accounts of the battle, in which Jzh Jzh was decapitated and his army defeated, note unusual military formations and the use of wooden fortifications foreign to the nomadic Huns. Dubs postulated that after the battle the Chinese employed the Roman mercenaries as border guards, settling them in Liqian, a short form of Alexandria used by the Chinese to denote Rome. While some Chinese scholars have been critical of Dubs' hypothesis, others went so far as to identify Lou Zhuangzi as the probable location of Liqian in the late 1980s.
 
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More on the theory that was first put forward in the 1950s by Homer Dubs..


Romans in China?
This idea was first proposed by Homer Hasenphlug Dubs, an Oxford University professor of Chinese history, who speculated in 1955 that some of the 10,000 Roman prisoners taken by the Parthians after the battle of Carrhae in southeastern Turkey in 53 B.C. made their way east to Uzbekistan to enlist with Jzh Jzh against the Han. Chinese accounts of the battle, in which Jzh Jzh was decapitated and his army defeated, note unusual military formations and the use of wooden fortifications foreign to the nomadic Huns. Dubs postulated that after the battle the Chinese employed the Roman mercenaries as border guards, settling them in Liqian, a short form of Alexandria used by the Chinese to denote Rome. While some Chinese scholars have been critical of Dubs' hypothesis, others went so far as to identify Lou Zhuangzi as the probable location of Liqian in the late 1980s.

This has been thoroughly debunked. Rome and China were aware of each other via the goods exchanged along the silk road, but that was the extent of it. The people of Liqian have since received genetic testing and they are not linked to Rome at all. They are more closely related to Central Asians (Afghanistan, Uzebekistan, etc) .
 
This has been thoroughly debunked. Rome and China were aware of each other via the goods exchanged along the silk road, but that was the extent of it. The people of Liqian have since received genetic testing and they are not linked to Rome at all. They are more closely related to Central Asians (Afghanistan, Uzebekistan, etc) .



debunked linkie pls :)
 
debunked linkie pls :)

http://www.springerlink.com/content/h715lv1315473n16/ said:
The Liqian people in north China are well known because of the controversial hypothesis of an ancient Roman mercenary origin. To test this hypothesis, 227 male individuals representing four Chinese populations were analyzed at 12 short tandem repeat (STR) loci and 12 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP). At the haplogroup levels, 77% Liqian Y chromosomes were restricted to East Asia. Principal component (PC) and multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis suggests that the Liqians are closely related to Chinese populations, especially Han Chinese populations, whereas they greatly deviate from Central Asian and Western Eurasian populations. Further phylogenetic and admixture analysis confirmed that the Han Chinese contributed greatly to the Liqian gene pool. The Liqian and the Yugur people, regarded as kindred populations with common origins, present an underlying genetic difference in a median-joining network. Overall, a Roman mercenary origin could not be accepted as true according to paternal genetic variation, and the current Liqian population is more likely to be a subgroup of the Chinese majority Han.

This info is even more up to date than what I heard when I was still studying Chinese history. They are more related to the Han than even the Central Asians. If the Central Asian link could be established then maybe there could be a loose connection to Rome, but not even that link was made.

The Roman mercenary theory was born out of European hubris, and the notion that the great and mighty Rome has been everywhere, in some way. It hasn't. Rome had its limits and we should accept them.
 
Thanks, Orion.

Hmmm still... would make a good screenplay :popcorn2:
 
Valerio Massimo Manfredi (I think that's his name, he's one of my fav authors) wrote an excellent book about it, called Empire of the Dragon.

neat. I'll have to check that out one of these days. thanks, Spud.
 
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