AskHistorians

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What happened to the democratically-elected assemblies of Greece after the Roman conquest? Did Greek cities maintain any degree of self-rule via popular assembly? Did the Romans empower oligarchs to handle local administration?	100
What could ancient Romans and their medieval European descendants offer to the Indians and Chinese in return for their fabulous trade goods?	99
American colonial settlers regularly "defected," from their culture and went to live with Native Americans. Did Native Americans ever willingly defect to the Europeans? Do we know what the defecting Europeans valued in Native American society that they lacked in colonial society?	99
Ancient Rome had a million people crammed into its 5.25 square miles, but the streets were winding and circuitous. Do we know how long it would take to walk from one end to the other?	98
Did vikings sleep in boxes?	96
The sphinx may be 12,000 years old according to some geologists studying how it's rock has weathered - far older than originally thought. What do historians make of the claim?	96
Did Sparta's colonies ever adopt the strict military training and education (agoge) of their mother city?	96
Did Roman senators sometimes get "stuck" at the lower end of the totem pole, continually holding minor magistracies as they got older? Or at some point did the unsuccessful ones stop running for offices and just sit in the senate?	96
Modern Iceland is self-sufficient in dairy, meat, and eggs, but imports the vast majority of its other food, since the land is mostly not suitable for farming. Was the local diet mostly animal-based in the Viking age? What else were they eating?	95
Why did the Romans use the land-based silk road routes — with their many middlemen and tax collectors — when they could just sail from the Red Sea to India and bypass all that? Wasn't the former much more expensive?	95

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