The Italian Genome-Fiorito et al 2015

The slaves in Roman empire were used for heavy work and their life expectancy was very low. You can read this in every historian book of Italy. American and suprematist germanic historians are a bunch of envious who think that ancient Greeks and Anatolians, Romans and even Egyptians were nordic. So lol.
The hellenized persons in Roman Italy came from Magna Graecia. Do you have realized that?Just look at how many colonies from Greeks there were in Italy. For example there were colonies outside Magna Graecia like Ancona and Adria who were sub-colonies of Siracusa. Surely the Greek speaking were them not "Syrian slaves" that surely has spoken in Aramaic.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Grecia

You are talking about much older events, not what was going on in later Roman times, which is what all these historians like Carcopino (yes, very "Germanic" surname) are talking about. The Hellenized slaves and "peregrini" of Roman times were predominantly Near Easterners. Juvenal denounced them as fakes, people from places like Syria who had adopted Greek customs and language, and this guy did not even like the "real" Greeks either, among other things he is well known for his anti-Greek bigotry, so he had no motivation whatsoever to try to defend them and their identity in the first place. Still, he distinguished them from Hellenized Near Easterners.
 
We are still waiting for the endless list of Middle Eastern inscriptions in Italy. Untill then, you are just dreaming.

On the other hand there is hard evidence (not just some Greek inscriptions and Juvenal's satirical works) that Romans had plenty of colonies in the rest of the Empire, including Iberia.

500px-Romancoloniae.jpg


Just out of curiosity: do you have a life outside of internet? You seem to be online 24/7, selectively quoting few historians, among thousands, who support your wacky theories.
 
LoL do you even realize that the Southern half of Italy was called Magna Graecia and was hellenized long before the Roman Empire was born? Do you also realize that ancient Romans had a HUGE fetish for anything Greek? I mean, they have found thousands of Greek inscriptions in Rome, but no Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic ones. I thought that only the 1% richest Levantines was able to speak Greek. You should come up with something better than quoting butthurt Germanic historians who wish that ancient Romans were blonder than modern Scandinavians!

Some actual scholarship to your point:
https://books.google.com/books?id=gl5T47CvuDsC&pg=PA169&lpg=PA169&dqq

"On the other hand, many popular slave names can be called "wish names" and seem to express the hope of the owner for what the slave might be like: Hilaris ("Happy"), Fidus ("Trusty")..."

Then there is the preponderance of Greek names. Was this an indication that all slaves in Rome, or Roman Italy as a whole came from the Hellenistic east? Hardly, although of course there were some, particularly during the Republican era and the early Empire.

However, what then of the million Gauls who were enslaved, or the Iberians, from those in Iberia itself to those who fought for the Carthaginians and were therefore captured during the Punic Wars, or the Britons, Germans, Dacians etc. Where are names of that ethnicity in the record? They are in tiny percentages when they appear at all.

The answer is that, as scholars in this field maintain, " Greek names for slaves marked slaves as an aspect of luxury and the good life, like fine furniture and art...the preponderance of Greek figures [in naming] again suggests an association of domestic slavery with civilization, luxury and culture."

What this means as a practical matter is that we can tell nothing about the origin of slaves from their names.
 
We are still waiting for the endless list of Middle Eastern inscriptions in Italy. Untill then, you are just dreaming.

On the other hand there is hard evidence (not just some Greek inscriptions and Juvenal's satirical works) that Romans had plenty of colonies in the rest of the Empire, including Iberia.

500px-Romancoloniae.jpg


Just out of curiosity: do you have a life outside of internet? You seem to be online 24/7, selectively quoting few historians, among thousands, who support your wacky theories.

When you finally understand what all these historians are saying, and that they are not pulling things out of their hats just for the heck of it, then perhaps you will start understanding that you hardly have to find "Middle Eastern inscriptions in Italy" to know that there were many people from that area. The fact most of these people bore Hellenized names is, as has been explained to death already, because Greek was an extremely common language in the Near East at this time in history. Greek, and even Latin itself, had even been spreading into some parts of Arabia, so let alone in places like Syria:

"In regions such as Palmyrene, the Hauran and Arabia, Greek was not the only language of inscriptions, and in such places Latin names are not uncommon, perhaps the result of contact with Roman soldiers instead of Hellenizing city-dwellers. In highly Hellenized regions such as the north, the coast and the Decapolis it is hardly surprising to find Greek names predominating."

Same book quoted in post #155, same page.

Lucian, for example, was of Syrian origin, and he wrote his works in Greek. You wouldn't be able to tell from such a name and the language he wrote in.

So it is hardly surprising at all if most "Orientals" at Rome in these times in fact had Hellenized names.

The slaves and immigrants that were coming to Rome were from many of those "Roman colonies", so I am not sure what are you trying to prove here by showing something everyone knows already, and no one is questioning either.

I was quoting a historian that was recommended by another user who said several things which are in fact contradicted by his own source.

You also seem to be here 24/7.
 
With all due respect to the poster Moore, the French historian Jerome Carcopino wrote his book in 1940. Scholarship has moved beyond basing its conclusions on gossip or anecdote, particularly literary ones. It is a book I would most emphatically NOT recommend to serious students of this particular subject.

Anyone who has actually studied this material in an academic setting knows that opinions differ, and that hard evidence is difficult to find. It comes down to interpretation of scarce data, and some issues, as many in archaeology and ancient history, will only be settled by the analysis of ancient dna.

However, in the interim one could do much worse than to turn to Walter Scheidel of Stanford University and his "The Roman Slave Supply".
https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/050704.pdf



“Ideally, slave totals would be tallied up from local or sectoral counts. In the absence of such data, I have tried to construct a probabilistic model that seeks to simulate this process by aggregating individual estimates for the likely demand for slaves in different sectors of the Italian economy (Scheidel 2005a). Needless to say, this method necessarily entails huge margins of error and cannot provide more than a rough notion of final outcomes under certain starting assumptions about the scale of domestic service or agricultural inputs. For this reason, my estimate of around 600,000 non-farming slaves in late Republican and early imperial Italy cannot be more than a highly tenuous conjecture. It may be somewhat less hazardous to assess levels of rural slavery, given that slave numbers can be linked to specific labor requirements. Rural slave numbers assume a pivotal role in any reconstruction of servile demography: in an ‘organic’ economy, for the share of slaves in the overall population to have been very large (e.g., along the lines of New World slave societies), the majority of slaves would need to have been employed in the countryside. However, in view of constraints on the expansion of cash crop farming and other areas of rural employment, this is very unlikely to have been the case in Roman Italy.”


"In my model,the most probable range of outcomes is consonant with a cumulative total of between one and one and a half million slaves in Italy at the peak of this labor regime, equivalent to some 15-25% of the total population. In the most general terms, there can be little doubt that despite their potentially vital contribution to agricultural production, slaves were disproportionately concentrated in the cities (Jongman 2003). "



This latter point was raised by Razib Khan, indicating, as is usually the case, that he has done extensive reading on the subjects upon which he ventures an opinion. As he also pointed out, in any invasion, including the final ones that brought about the fall of the Empire, the urban populations, and, unfortunately for them, the slaves of the urban populations, were the most likely to meet unfortunate ends.


Now, what about the rest of the empire? According to the author, there was better record keeping in Egypt, which gives a rough estimate of 5-10% of the population being enslaved. The lower number makes perfect sense in that the fields of Egypt had existed for millennia, and had been extensively cultivated by native Egyptians or people taken in slavery by the Egyptians, and there was no necessity for massive new numbers of slaves to be introduced. This is borne out by the fact that in Egypt there were more urban slaves than rural slaves. As long as the grain shipments came in, the Romans may have decided in large measure to leave well enough alone except for some resupply where necessary and when the price was sufficiently low because of recent conquests.


What of Asia Minor, or Gaul, or Iberia, or Britain? As the author points out, “estimate of overall slave numbers would critically depend on conditions in areas that yield hardly any pertinent information. Existing proposals – of 10% or 17-20% for the entire Empire – are necessarily mere guesses.”

What is the author’s conclusion? “What remains is the impression that large concentrations of slaves in the hands of elites outside Italy were by no means considered implausible. “ For those unfamiliar with the process of Romanization, those elites would not necessarily have been “Roman” or better yet “Italic” elites. The co-opting of local elites was an important part of Romanization.


In actuality, all of these figures are guesses, but some are more grounded in fact. So, we see a substantial number of slaves in the Italic peninsula, although not the inflated numbers proposed by some scholars in the past, and slavery in other parts of the Empire as well, although probably not at Italian levels. I don't think the evidence supports anything more precise than that.
 
The slaves in Roman empire were used for heavy work and their life expectancy was very low. You can read this in every historian book of Italy. American and suprematist germanic historians are a bunch of envious who think that ancient Greeks and Anatolians, Romans and even Egyptians were nordic. So lol.
The hellenized persons in Roman Italy came from Magna Graecia. Do you have realized that?Just look at how many colonies from Greeks there were in Italy. For example there were colonies outside Magna Graecia like Ancona and Adria who were sub-colonies of Siracusa. Surely the Greek speaking were them not "Syrian slaves" that surely has spoken in Aramaic.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Grecia

http://www.crystalinks.com/romeslavery.html

with slaves constituting 40 percent of the population. Enslaved people with talent, skill, or beauty commanded the highest prices, and many served as singers, scribes, jewelers, bartenders, and even doctors. One slave trained in medicine was worth the price of 50 agricultural slaves. Roman law was inconsistent on slavery. Slaves were considered property; they had no rights and were subject to their owners' whims.

40 percent of the population ...............you do realise that the populace of ancient Rome was always larger than modern Rome.
 
We are still waiting for the endless list of Middle Eastern inscriptions in Italy. Untill then, you are just dreaming.

On the other hand there is hard evidence (not just some Greek inscriptions and Juvenal's satirical works) that Romans had plenty of colonies in the rest of the Empire, including Iberia.

500px-Romancoloniae.jpg


Just out of curiosity: do you have a life outside of internet? You seem to be online 24/7, selectively quoting few historians, among thousands, who support your wacky theories.

Colonies = immigrants and not the major populace of the area ..............these colonies are Roman citizens with families, there are no Roman settlements/colonies, in the alps, illyricium, also in sardinia and Portugal
 
http://www.crystalinks.com/romeslavery.htmlwith slaves constituting 40 percent of the population. Enslaved people with talent, skill, or beauty commanded the highest prices, and many served as singers, scribes, jewelers, bartenders, and even doctors. One slave trained in medicine was worth the price of 50 agricultural slaves. Roman law was inconsistent on slavery. Slaves were considered property; they had no rights and were subject to their owners' whims. 40 percent of the population ...............you do realise that the populace of ancient Rome was always larger than modern Rome.
None is debating the high number of servants here. The matter is their ethnic origin. The user Drac keeps selectively quoting few historians from the 19th century/early 20th century, who assumed that half of Italy was repopulated by Syrians just because they found some tombs in the city of Rome with hellenized semitic names like Luke, Paul, Mattew, John,....He really thinks that millions of such semites were all Greek speaking and left not a single inscription in their middle eastern language anywhere in Italy. His main evidence is Juvenal's satyrical works. Hahahaha. Could you believe it?
 
Colonies = immigrants and not the major populace of the area ..............these colonies are Roman citizens with families, there are no Roman settlements/colonies, in the alps, illyricium, also in sardinia and Portugal

Either you haven't looked at the map, or you don't know where the Alps are located.

Also, who's talking about Portugal or Sardinia? The discussion, such as it is, is about Drac's quest to prove that all of the Anatolian Neolithic and CHG ancestry in Italians comes from slaves during the Roman era, and not from slaves from all over the known world at the time, but specifically from slaves from the Near East and North Africa, thereby somehow making his country's own similar levels of the same total ancestry somehow "better" or more worthy. At least, that's as much sense as I can make of his arguments. The fact that no matter when they entered Europe they are the same alleles seems to have escaped him.

I'm also unsure of the point of your post. Is it that there weren't Roman settlements in the part of the Alps closest to the Veneto? It appears that there were some, but I don't see that it matters. It won't make people of the Veneto, even the far northern Veneto, any less southern European if that is the goal, at least if the published calculator results at 23andme from the various calculators are any indication.

Ed. As to the effect of the Roman settlements and their effect on the local genetics, I would have said the same. However, if the recent Busby et al study is to be believed, there was a significant impact of Italic peoples not only in Iberia, but even all the way up in Britain. We'll see if further studies bear that out. It will also be crucial for the general discussion to get ancient dna from the Etruscans, and early Republican era Romans, Samnites etc. and compare them to the genomes of the Romans at the time of the Germanic invasions. I'm ready, as always, to accept whatever the genetics studies done by top tier labs might show.
 
Colonies = immigrants and not the major populace of the area ..............these colonies are Roman citizens with families, there are no Roman settlements/colonies, in the alps, illyricium, also in sardinia and Portugal
Those are only the official colonies built by the Roman state. Most Romans settled in indigenous cities.
 
Carcopino's work is perfectly fine, the fact that it was written in 1940 hardly prevents it from being so; scholarship on this subject goes to much before that. It is not based on "gossip or anecdote" but on actual historical sources (end-notes provide all the references he used), and many of the things he says are supported by other historians.

Fair enough, the points raised in Scheidel's paper are perfectly valid, and calculations about numbers of slaves vary among historians.

However, the argument that some dilettantes try to conjure up that most slaves died of famines, diseases and wars because they concentrated in the cities, and therefore we must dismiss them as having had any relevancy for demographic matters, is dubious at best because it rests on one assumption and two important omissions:

1- It assumes that the population of the cities remained static, even for centuries, and that all people there, including their slaves, did not eventually move around and settle in other places

2- It omits the important fact of manumission, a very common practice among the Romans

3- It also omits to take into account the large number of free foreigners, who were never slaves

Furthermore, this argument can be easily and conveniently also applied to other times as well, like the Middle Ages, where wars, famines and diseases would also decimate cities.
 
None is debating the high number of servants here. The matter is their ethnic origin. The user Drac keeps selectively quoting few historians from the 19th century/early 20th century, who assumed that half of Italy was repopulated by Syrians just because they found some tombs in the city of Rome with hellenized semitic names like Luke, Paul, Mattew, John,....He really thinks that millions of such semites were all Greek speaking and left not a single inscription in their middle eastern language anywhere in Italy. His main evidence is Juvenal's satyrical works. Hahahaha. Could you believe it?

the two areas in question is slaves and colonies ..........and some here have an agenda to assume my aim is something other than what I state.
I state

Rome had many slaves in ancient times and the bulk was always near Rome the city...............if the numbers do not please you , bad luck............my agenda on this in regards to genetic legacy for Rome, well it is minimal.........the percent of male slaves that left offspring in Rome is very minimal, while female slaves left a greater legacy on the genetic makeup of the Romans.

In regards to colonies.......the term means a minimal of actual Romans comprised of the percentage of the populace............the genetic legacy of these Roman colonies is minimal. A colony would not represent IMO more than 10% of Romans over the local populace. How many Romans do you think there where?
To even become a Roman was a minimum wait of 25 years..............most citizens did not even have a chance for their Roman citizenship application because they died before hand.
 
None is debating the high number of servants here. The matter is their ethnic origin. The user Drac keeps selectively quoting few historians from the 19th century/early 20th century, who assumed that half of Italy was repopulated by Syrians just because they found some tombs in the city of Rome with hellenized semitic names like Luke, Paul, Mattew, John,....He really thinks that millions of such semites were all Greek speaking and left not a single inscription in their middle eastern language anywhere in Italy. His main evidence is Juvenal's satyrical works. Hahahaha. Could you believe it?

False, I quote from historians from all over the 19th to 21st century span of time. It is not like opinions on this subject have changed too much among the majority of historians in all this time. On many points most of them still agree with their predecessors.

You have already seen how common Hellenized names were among Near Easterners, and not from a "19th century source" (which they also knew about already) but straight from a 21st century one.

Keep thinking it is only Juvenal. He is just one of the ancient writers to make comments on the topics of slaves and foreigners which allow historians get a good idea of what was going on at the time.
 
By the way, the point of all this is not to disparage Italians, in fact there is nothing "bad" about any of the things being said about this part of Italy's history, but actually to show Angela's convenient double-standards and semi-hidden agendas, as explained in a previous post in this thread. Her point all throughout being that we must remain very open minded about anything that is published about "Moors" and their supposed impact on medieval Iberia and Sicily, despite the fact that historians specializing on the subject have estimated the numbers of these foreign Muslim invaders to be rather low, but at the same time we must conveniently and paradoxically dismiss anything that even remotely suggests anything that could have to do with the quite larger numbers of slaves and free foreigners in Roman Italy, who hardly must have left anything but a trace of influence. For those of you who have a hard time "reading between the lines" or paying attention to details, just look for example at how very quickly she tried to dismiss the admixture estimates of this study that point to Roman times in the case of North and Central Italy; any study that even as much as suggests this is summarily dismissed or found full of faults, while just about any fishy paper making claims about "Moors" in Iberia or Sicily is very possible and we all must remain very open minded. She knows very well what this is all about, she's been trying to pull this for quite a while, but of course as usual she pretends she doesn't really know what it's all about.
 
False, I quote from historians from all over the 19th to 21st century span of time. It is not like opinions on this subject have changed too much among the majority of historians in all this time. On many points most of them still agree with their predecessors.

You have already seen how common Hellenized names were among Near Easterners, and not from a "19th century source" (which they also knew about already) but straight from a 21st century one.

Keep thinking it is only Juvenal. He is just one of the ancient writers to make comments on the topics of slaves and foreigners which allow historians get a good idea of what was going on at the time.

what is a near - easterners ?

Linguists state Hattian and Hurrian was adapted and used by the Hittites ~1700BC , it is nothing except only indo-european. It is clearly stated as not being from the semitic language tree.
With this knowledge, then the hatti and hurrians are also clearly a non-semitic people mostly likely from the southern Caucasus area.
There are over 50 volumes of hittite script which have been studied in respect to language.

Are south -caucasus people near -easterners?

I doubt with this hittite knowledge , the percent of Anatolia being near-easterner is very remote
 
Owing to the limited time-depth of the Roman historiographical tradition, specific references to wartime enslavement are rare until the beginning of the third century BC: the true extent of the alleged mass enslavement ofthe inhabitants of Veii in 396 BC remains unknowable."

To continue:

Third Samnite War (297-293 BC)-58,000-77,000 individuals. (Once again, for those unfamiliar with the period, the Samnites were fellow inhabitants of the Italic peninsula.)

First Punic War (263-241 BC) 100,000 slaves.

http://www.kirkwood.k12.mo.us/paren...arthage_chris_m_8w/images/First Punic War.jpg

Acragas in Sicily (261 BC)-the sack and enslavement of the entire surviving population of one of the largest Greek cities in the western Mediterranean

Second Punic War (218-202 BC)-over 100,000. According to the poster Drac, there were very few actual Carthaginians in Spain, so if we follow his logic, the soldiers from Spain who would have been enslaved would primarily have been Iberians. I’m not so sr about that, but certainly when we get to the battles which were fought in France and Italy, most of the combatants would have been allied tribes from those areas, including my own Celt-Ligurians, who seem to have made a habit of choosing the losing side. The battles in southern Italy also often involved Greek city states who made the wrong choice, with the predictable consequences.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Second_Punic_War_full-en.svg/2000px-Second_Punic_War_full-en.svg.png

Celt-Ligurians (230-14 BC) 40,000

Celts at Telamon (225 BC) 40,000 Dead, 10,000 Enslaved

Epirus (between Albania and Greece-167 BC-150,000 captives

Macedonians (140 BC) Unknown numbers enslaved during the Macedonian Wars

Seleucid Empire in Near East (100-63 BC) Unknown numbers of slaves
Cimbri and Teutones (102-101 BC) 60,000 and 90,000.

Athens, Corinth-Unknown Numbers.

The “Gladitorial Wars” of Spartacus, commonly known as a slave revolt, were fought mostly by Thracian and Celtic gladiators, many of the latter presumably from Gallia Cisalpina, since this was before the major engagements in Gallia Transalpina. 6,000 of the rebels were reputedly crucified along the Appian Way, with the remainder re-enslaved.

Gallic Wars (58 BC to 50 BC)-this was the mother lode, up to ONE MILLION slaves, and thus the largest single recorded group by far.

Dacians (AD 105) 500,000

Jewish Wars 97,000

Parthians (198 AD) 100,000

I haven't given total numbers for some groups like the Germanic tribes, the Britons, the Iberians, because I'm not aware of reliable sources for them, but we know that the flow would have been there as the result of the wars of conquest fought on or near their territories.


Now, do I believe that these figures are rock solid? No, I don’t. I have about the same skepticism about them as I do about the figures for the total number of slaves. The point is that contrary to the assertions of our resident Spanish Nordicist, it should be clear that Rome was an equal opportunity enslaver. There is no indication whatsoever that the majority of slaves were sourced from the Near East or North Africa. It is quite the contrary in fact if you add up the numbers.

Nor have I ever seen anything in any volume on the history of the period or specifically on the history of slavery in the period to indicate that slaves from the Near East made their way to Italia in disproportionate numbers at the expense of Gauls or Germans or Dacians/Thracians or Greeks. The historian I cited upthread nicely takes care of all the nonsense theories about why the slaves so often had Greek names. Obviously, as we barely see a Gallic or German or Dacian or British name among the slaves, the slaves from these areas must have been given Roman or, more often, Greek names.

Now, conquest was not the only source of slaves, and the reason partly has to do with the lack of longevity among them.

(To be continued)
 
Scholars are hard pressed to get accurate data for the fertility of slaves both within slavery and after manumission.

The following is generally accepted among historians of the period:

"Owing to heavy disease loads, life was short even in the top echelons of Roman society. For that reason alone, slaves need not have lived significantly shorter lives simply because of the hazards inherent their legal status. However, the use of slaves in particularly unhealthy rural locales and especially their disproportionate concentration in large and therefore infection-rich cities may well have lowered their overall mean life expectancy even further, thereby impeding natural reproduction at or near replacement level."

Also, " Several factors militated against slave reproduction at or near replacement level: imbalanced sex ratios if and when they persisted; higher mortality in cities and mines and on malarial estates; family break-ups through sale or inheritance; and the manumission of slave women of childbearing age.”

Indeed, while the average life expectancy of the poor in the empire was, according to certain scholars from 20-30 years, that of slaves was under 20. Miners, galley slaves, and men being worked to death under insalubrious conditions in latifundia weren't procreating and keeping slave numbers stable. Only house slaves and commercial slaves would have fared better, but most of them were living in crowded urban environments and would have been subject to the periodic outbreaks of disease that entailed.

For the viewpoint of another respected historian, we have John Madden:
http://www.ucd.ie/cai/classics-ireland/1996/Madden96.html
"However, on closer analysis, this reasoning is flawed. True, some of the more fortunate city slaves and certain rural ones as well enjoyed a secure home life. And undoubtedly these together with the many female slaves who had children by their masters (or other free men) will have contributed considerably to the number of new slaves entering the system each year. Nevertheless, the belief that the total slave-body was more or less self-propagating is unsound. There are a number of reasons for this.

"1. First of all it is clear that males were in the majority where work was difficult and weighty - in building, in mining, in numerous types of industry, in a wide variety of services such as loading and unloading at docks, portage, transportation, etc. In agriculture also male slaves would have been more in demand. Small landowners would have to be content with whatever slaves were available irrespective of their sex, while large landowners would undoubtedly have needed some female slaves e.g. for weaving, cloth making, cooking. However, it is clear from passages in Varro and Columella, where the question of which of the more reliable agricultural slaves should be allowed a female companion is treated, that permission for such a partner was a special concession. Varro recommended that praefecti ['overseers'], as an incentive to their faithfulness, should be granted female slaves with whom they could have children, while lesser slaves should have to do with less (Rust. 1.17.5,7). In Columella, on the other hand, it is the vilicus ['steward'] who should be given a female partner (Rust. 1.8.4). In the ergastula - the private prisons belonging to many Roman farms where slaves were forced to work in fetters - the inmates would have been very largely male. It is evident from this that among agricultural slaves males surely outnumbered females.

When we turn to domestic staff the evidence suggests that there too male slaves were more numerous. S. Treggiari in her analysis of the 79 members of the city household staff of Livia has noted that 77% were male (the percentage was similar among freedpersons and slaves). This is a very revealing figure since we would expect a domina to have a higher number of female staff than a dominus. And in her study of the city familiae of the Statilii and the Volusii Treggiari has shown that about 66% of the freedpersons and slaves were male, while of the thirty child slaves whose names were inscribed on the tombs of these two families 80% at a minimum were male. "

So, contrary to an assertion made upthread, the statements of Razib Khan in his comments about this paper are in total accord with the pronouncements of recognized authorities and it is those who assert the contrary who are obviously posting unsupported opinions motivated by repugnant world views.

According to a recognized specialist in this field, " I allow for a reproductive shortfall of up to 50% in late Republican Italy, at a time when the slave population was greatly expanding and dynamically unstable."

Note that this is at a time when military conquests were increasing the number of slaves.


So, how was the deficit at least partly made up?

Walter Scheidel makes short shrift of the role of pirates in supplying slaves. You may wish to read his explanations on page ten of his work:
https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/050704.pdf

Other sources included those enslaved as the result of conviction of crimes, among which were avoiding the census and the draft, freedwomen cohabiting with slaves, and ungrateful freedmen. Foundlings were sometimes enslaved, and poor parents sometimes sold either themselves or their children or both into slavery, and increasingly as time went on, but it's impossible to get completely accurate numbers for this local source of slaves.

"It is unlikely that Roman fathers ever had a formal right to sell their children; in classical law, family members could not be sold into slavery or pawned. As in the case of enslaved foundlings, the state favored a pragmatic compromise position: the sale of minors did not affect their status and was technically void; therefore, redemption remained possible, with or sometimes without compensation. This focus on redemption accounts for prohibitions of the sale of such slaves overseas.
30
As a result, there were no clear boundaries between sale, pawning, and lease: given the formal inviolability of free status, ‘sale’ might merely amount to an extended lease of minors in times of hardship. "


Bondage for debt, which could be for life given the life expectancy of the average slave, also increased as time went on and the Empire came under more stress.

Some of the short fall was made up because slave trading was conducted with peripheral areas once the maximum extent of the empire had been reached and no new conquests were filling the slave marts.

“The Black Sea region and the Caucasus had been well established as a major source of slaves since the archaic Greek period (see Chapter 6), and this tradition continued into late antiquity. Together with free Germany, that northeastern periphery must have accounted for most imports once the Roman empire had reached its maximum extension. Black slaves from as far away as Somalia and the occasional import from India made for comparatively rare but consequently high-prestige retainers.”

It should no longer need to be repeated that these slaves would have gone to wealthy estates in the provinces as well as Italia, whether the estates were owned by Italic Romans or Gallic Romans etc. The enslavement of foundlings, debtors etc. would have been the enslavement of locals.


 
Now, let's turn to the flow of genetic material from the slave population into the larger surrounding community anywhere in the Empire, which is the preoccupation of one of our posters. It is once again difficult to get precise numbers. In the case of the manumission of female slaves, for example, it's unclear whether slave women of child bearing age could be manumitted. The same author points out that:


"According to the Egyptian census returns, women were not normally manumitted prior to menopause, a custom that ensured that all their offspring remained the property of their owners. The price edict of AD 301 also indicates that a premium was placed on the reproductive capabilities of female slaves. By contrast, inscriptions from Italy and the western provinces frequently commemorate young and fecund freedwomen. Once again, we lack the means to decide whether we are dealing with genuine geographical variation or merely distorting recording practices that (in

the latter case) gave undue prominence to the experience of privileged and otherwise unrepresentative slave women. "


There is also the fact that a certain number of male slaves were castrated. This practice wasn't outlawed until the end of the first century, but the trade continued even after that. Many of the most wealthy and successful freedmen who surrounded the Emperors were, in fact, eunuchs.

Over and beyond that, even favored male slaves did not normally receive their manumission until they had outlived their usefulness.

Of course, there were especially favored young and nubile male and female slaves who were manumitted in time to marry into the surrounding community. That is known from inscriptions of such freedmen who acquired enough property to leave behind funerary artifacts.

The question is how much gene flow did that entail? Some, certainly, but how much? Without some ancient dna I don't see how we can get anywhere near precise figures. Even with it, there will no doubt be difficulties.

What is without a doubt is that contrary to the assertion of one of our posters there is nothing to indicate that this gene flow would have been disproportionately from Near Eastern, or even less, North African slaves. Quite the contrary, in fact, given the figures for the slaves from Gaul alone. Nor was there an embargo on traders from Germania, and Britannia, and Gaul, and Iberia. They were all Roman citizens after a certain point and free to travel and work in Rome. Only the most biased and agenda driven reasoning would harp on such denizens of Rome coming from the Near East, not that they too didn't exist, of course.

Also, there is the question of the "Italian cline". What was first postulated by this poster was that the "excess" CHG or "southern" ancestry in southern Italians and Sicilians, and even in Tuscans, was because of ancestry from the Near East during the time of the Roman Empire. In the Tuscans it's also purported to be from a massive invasion from Asia Minor.

I will give the Tuscans short shrift. Their admixture "components" are remarkably similar to those of the people of Albania, Kosovo, and the very northwestern parts of Greece. I'm not aware of those areas having been on the receiving end of a mass invasion from Lydia in Anatolia or being the epicenter of slavery from the Levant.

That there might have been an elite migration from the Aegean/northwest coastal Anatolia is certainly plausible. Given the PCA that was recently published of elite "Etruscans" showing them plotting with Southern Europeans, and not that far from modern Tuscans, I doubt anything more than that took place, but should the ancient dna prove that is the case, it is perfectly fine with me. I just want to be related to them even if that is unlikely. Their precise genetic make-up is immaterial to me. I just love their culture, and in additio I've been clambering over their remains since my father took me to visit them as a child.

Let us now try to get a handle on how much "excess" we're talking about for southern Italy compared to a place like Greece or Spain, for that matter. I see no need to go over the data for Greece. The level for even mainland Greece for CHG, after the impact of the Slavic invasions is roughly equal to that of southern Italy, never mind central and northern Italy, and the levels in the Balkans aren't much lower. I have posted the data before or people can access the spreadsheets for the various calculators.

Or, we can turn to Spain. The Lazaridis/Haak statistics obviously couldn't tell the difference between Anatolian Neolithic genes and CHG genes, and lumped them all in together as EEF, which is understandable as they are indeed similar. The Spanish except for Pais Vasco (as I already pointed out in another thread that information can be found in the supplement) come in at 81%. The Sicilians at 90%. Even if you take this at face value, does 8 or 9% make a difference as to whether you can be in the European club? Are the Finns going to be disqualified too? Their 8+% admixture isn't even "Caucasoid". Speaking of that, given that Near Easterners are indeed "Caucasoid", should the pertinent statistic for inclusion or exclusion, in addition to Siberian and East Asian be "SSA" percentages? I think all of Spain, not just southern Italy and Sicily might be in trouble on that one.

Do you see how ridiculous this quickly becomes? That's what makes me angry and causes me to respond even when the comments are obviously nonsensical. That, and the fact that dishonesty and lack of integrity are second only to cruelty in my personal list of detested traits.

See:

View attachment 7568

The major difference between Spaniards and Sicilians is because of a difference in the WHG number. That Iberian Neolithics had some extra WHG compared even to Remedello has been apparent for some time. Are we supposed to care?

Perhaps the most persuasive data comes from IBD analyses. I have made reference to Ralph and Coop before. Read it. They find no evidence of substantial gene flow into Italian populations after about 400 BC, which would let the Celts/Gauls and the Greeks in under the wire, but would exclude both slaves from later periods of the Empire and the Germanic invaders. Now, this was based on one set of data, and they might consider anything under 10% insignificant, but those are their findings.

See:
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555

Razib Khan also has all the pertinent data, and has done an analysis in comparison to Levantines (Syria) in particular and sees no "recent" as in post Neolithic gene flow. He does see some gene flow from North Africa, but that makes sense given the Moorish occupation. The male uniparental markers likely to hail from there are under 7%, however. Dienekes found much the same in his IBD runs with Near Eastern and southern European populations.

Of course, analyses based on modern populations can only take us so far. What we need is a lot of ancient dna. I am totally open to whatever the ancient dna will show. Whatever our "mix", it's obviously the best. :)

Given these facts, I'm at a loss as to the reason why this poster is obsessed with making claims that the Italian genetic signature is due overwhelmingly to some non-existent disproportionality in the slave numbers from the Near East versus Europe during the period of the Empire. Well, I'm not actually at a loss. Anyone who has read his thousands of posts here knows that it is part of the longstanding "war" between Spanish and Italian Nordicists, skin heads, call them what you will, over who is least "southern". To say I find it disgusting is an understatement.

As to said poster's attempts at character assassination, I have no fears. His preoccupations and motivations are clear to anyone who has read his thousands of posts here on this site. I'm sure they can be found elsewhere as well, but since I'm not an habitue of those sites, I can't tell you what name he hides behind there. A word to those who would attempt to go there: if, like me, you don't have very sophisticated blocking programs, your computer will be infested with malware within a minute. My advice would be to follow my lead and not go there; it's not worth it.

I have made all these points before, and cited the relevant sources before. To say that I resent having to redo all this work because someone chooses to ignore the evidence time after time is an understatement. In the future, I will simply post a link to this thread. Any attempt to dispute this data without relevant contrary data will be summarily dealt with as an attempt to mislead other posters.

Now until after Christmas I'm out. Some of us do have a life outside of population genetics.
 
what is a near - easterners ?

Linguists state Hattian and Hurrian was adapted and used by the Hittites ~1700BC , it is nothing except only indo-european. It is clearly stated as not being from the semitic language tree.
With this knowledge, then the hatti and hurrians are also clearly a non-semitic people mostly likely from the southern Caucasus area.
There are over 50 volumes of hittite script which have been studied in respect to language.

Are south -caucasus people near -easterners?

I doubt with this hittite knowledge , the percent of Anatolia being near-easterner is very remote

Near Easterner means anyone coming from the Near East, irrespective of ethnolinguistic affiliation:

Map-Ancient-Near-East.gif
 
We can gather some information from ancient BC sources about the numbers and place of origin of some slaves back then:


https://books.google.com/books?id=7...Rome's successful expansionist wars."&f=false

177 BC 5,632 Istrians

167 BC 150,000 Epeirotes (Greeks)

146 BC 55,000 Carthaginians

142 BC 9,500 Iberians

101 BC 60,000 Cimbri (Celts or Germanics)

The slave revolts that started before Spartacus included slaves from all over the empire that were in Italy at the time. In fact, the first of such revolts was started by slaves in Sicily, their leader being a Syrian slave named Eunus. These wars indeed ended up in a lot of slaves getting killed due to their uprisings against the Romans. But these are older events. We are talking about the later day slavery of the times of Nero, the Antonines and the centuries AD. As is shown by a bunch of historians already referred to, the slaves and free foreigners of these later AD times came predominantly from the East. Literary sources pointing to this are not "gossip" or whatever is it that our resident Italian Nordicist wants to dismiss it with, but statements by people who were actually there and saw what was going on with their own eyes. When authors like Martial, Juvenal, Petronius, Umbricius, etc. mention slaves and foreigners in Rome they usually mention people from Africa and the Near East, not Gauls or Germanics. These last ones are more rarely mentioned. This is not "gossip" but the Rome these fellows saw with their own eyes and wrote about. Curiously and ironically enough, a good number of "Roman" writers at these times were themselves non-Romans, and some of them were acting like they were more Roman than the Romans themselves and disparaging foreigners. Once again pointing at how common the non-Roman population had become in Rome itself. But since Angela can't argue against eye-witnesses who were actually there, she tries to reduce this to "gossip", as if they were talking from hearsay. The topic of the "corruption" of Roman society was in fact commonly attributed to the large influx of slaves and foreigners coming from the Eastern parts of the empire, as Cicero's grandfather already put it:

https://books.google.com/books?id=S...ng undermined by foreign immigrants."&f=false

"There was a widespread belief that traditional values were being undermined by foreign immigrants. The decadence that was perceived to permeate the Republic was attributed largely to slippery and corrupt Greeks and Asiatics who had come to Rome from the hellenized Orient. Cicero's paternal grandfather, for one, would have nothing to do with them and deplored falling standards of Roman morality. "Our people are like Syrian slaves: the better they speak Greek, the more shiftless they are."


The historian I cited in posts #164 & #155 takes care of the nonsense that Near Easterners did not have Hellenized names or did not know Greek. Even in one of Angela's very own sources the author implies that besides "fashion" the reason why so many slaves had Greek names was because many of them came from the Hellenized East:

"Greek names dominate the record not just because many slaves came from the Hellenistic East, but also because they were fashionable."

Notice the "not just" part. Scheidel is obviously not dismissing the important contribution of the many Hellenized slaves to the total number of Greek names among Rome's slaves.

People in those times often died at earlier ages, this is true even of free people, as Angela's own sources show, so it also applies to slaves. But so? Does this mean we must disregard everyone's role in the demographics of those times just because of lower life expectancy? Don't think so. By the way, we can easily apply the same "logic" to the Middle Ages and its also lower life expectancy. So say bye-bye to any alleged "Moorish influence". Sure, them "Moors" were also dropping like flies because of war, disease and famine, so forget about them having had any significant influence either.

Furthermore, even one of her own sources mentions manumission as a key factor in reducing the slave reproduction rate:

"Manumission was probably a more important determinant of attrition and thus slave fertility. The age-specific incidence of manumission of female slaves is of pivotal importance....
Several factors militated against slave reproduction at or near replacement level:imbalanced sex ratios if and when they persisted; higher mortality in cities and mines and onmalarial estates; family break-ups through sale or inheritance; and the manumission of slave women of childbearing age."

In fact, mortality rate is only one reason and not one that Scheidel gives the highest importance. As for the important factor of manumission, demographically speaking these foreigners were still there, but now were no longer slaves.This does not mean that the foreigners in question "disappeared" or died off, they simply became freedmen. So contrary to what Angela pretends, this in fact agrees with what I and a whole bunch of historians have said, not Razib Khan's rather simplistic and naive argument about most slaves simply dying off in the big cities. Manumission played a very important part.


The Late Republic was around 147–30 BC. Slavery continued for many more centuries after that. Not to say anything of immigration from free foreigners.


From Angela's own source we can deduce that the numbers of slaves imported into Italy were larger than those imported elsewhere, as common sense dictates, Italy being the center of the empire and thus demanding more slaves from other areas, not the other way around. Something she herself had to finally "sort of" admit (after countless previous denials) as very likely in post #165 of this thread.


The IBD conclusions of Ralph & Coop's paper are well known to the authors of the paper that is the subject of this thread, yet it did not stop them one bit from estimating the age of North African, Middle Eastern and North European DNA in North Italy to around Roman times, and in Central Italy to around a bit before Etruscan times to Roman times. For Southern Italy their estimate gave medieval results. Notice how Angela tries to dismiss these results very quickly, particularly when it concerns Central Italy (Tuscany is located there.) The results are not to her satisfaction, she wants more ancient and prehistoric links. Why? Because she knows very well the arguments that Nordicists use against Southern Europeans having more "recent" and therefore "less white" ancestry (again, this "less whiteness" thing is just a bogus claim that they invented and did not get from legitimate historians and anthropologists.) She wants to avoid Italy from being put in the same bag. So the party line is basically "if you want recent ancestry look at the Iberians and Sicilians, they have some from the medieval Moors, but in continental Italy we are truly prehistoric in origin and haven't changed in thousands of years, just like you". Once again, nevermind the paradox that the numbers of slaves and immigrants in Roman times were quite larger than those of the Muslim foreigners anywhere in Europe in the Middle Ages. I have already posted the estimates from several historians for Arabs/Berbers in Iberia in other threads, they range from under 10% to less than 5% of the total population of Alandalus or the peninsula. The estimates one can see for slaves and foreigners from historians specializing in Roman Italy are almost always larger. In Angela's very own source, the estimate for the slaves alone was around 15-25% of the population, and other higher figures can be provided from other historians. Example:

https://books.google.com/books?id=7...Rome's successful expansionist wars."&f=false

"Nevertheless, it has been estimated that at the end of the first century BC the body of slaves in Italy amounted to between two and three million people out of a total of six to seven-and-a-half million (including Gallia Cisalpina), or roughly one-third of the population"

1/3 = 33%

Angela very arbitrarily subordinates history to genetics when it is convenient for her agenda. But when genetics seemingly agrees with the historical record and points to Roman times as the source of genetic influx, then she turns the tables and subordinates genetics to her version of "history". Since the estimates that point to Roman times are not to her liking, then she conjures up excuses about slaves (never mind manumission and all the free foreign citizens) easily going the way of dodo-bird and therefore the genetic results are "bad" and must be dismissed. Her games are very easy to perceive for any observant person who has been reading her posts on this subject for a long time. That is the same reason why she also dismissed other papers trying to asses "recent" DNA in Europe. The results for Italy did not satisfy her expectations. They also point to Roman or medieval times. Not good. What will those Nordicists think of Italians? They will also find support for their claims in genetics. Not good. This is a "privilege" that Angela only wants to reserve for Iberians and Sicilians. Notice that when a vague speculative paper about Iberians comes around that offers a wide range of "possibilities" that could go from ancient times to immigrants from the Americas, like that "African" mtDNA paper, she sings its praises, inflates its supposed importance, and arbitrarily declares that the "Moors" must have had something to do with it. The way she treats papers on Italy and Iberia are diametrically opposed. When it comes to Italy, if the results are not to her liking, like those of the present paper, and there is any suggestion whatsoever that it might have to do with Roman times, she finds a myriad of obstacles and faults. When it comes to Iberia, on the other hand, even the faintest suggestion that it has something to do with "Moors" is quickly approved and given all credibility in the world. Same old, same old. Angela hasn't changed her tune in years. I am very familiar with this song and dance.


Predictably, Angela conjures up Lazaridis/Haak et al. and then tries to drop the "SSA" thingy on Spain, one of her favorite topics. Never mind the fact that the authors of that paper themselves question their own results in this matter, offering possible explanations, like using larger sample size. I can also conjure up the results of Busby et al., a paper that Angela most certainly does not like and dismisses any way she can, and point out how in their admixture run results the largest West African component was found among Tuscans. Was it sample size too? Maybe. They did use more Tuscan samples than of any other European group.


Character assassination? This coming from the very person who goes around gratuitously accusing those she does not like of being "Nazis", "racists", "Nordicists", etc.


Razib Khan is a blogger and columnist, not a geneticist who has actually published anything in any journals. And some of his arguments are not as good as he thinks they are. Plus he is well known to have very questionable and controversial agendas and affiliations, that's why he was fired from the New York Times:

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/03/new-york-times-drops-razib-khan-204287

So it does not surprise me that our resident Italian Nordicist seems to like him so much.
 
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