/u/Snowblinded's posts in /r/AskHistorians

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In the Inferno, Dante places the Persion philosopher Ibn Sina in Limbo alongside other virtuous pagans. Was the idea that these Islamic intellectual figures were essentially good men who had the bad luck of being born into a non-Christian community a common way of understanding Muslim thinkers?

233 upvotes

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Arguably the greatest innovation Genghis Khan made to steppe warfare was the incorporation of Chinese siege units into his army. What was life actually like for these Chinese members of the horde? Would they have been treated as any other soldiers, or would they have been seen as glorified slaves?

112 upvotes

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Snobbish early Western scholars of China thought the logographic script was simple pictographs. The courts of classical China had no shortage of cultural elitism, and access to Sanskrit/Devanagari. Do Chinese sources ever present a similarly derisive view of phonetic scripts/Indo-European languages?

102 upvotes

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What would the geopolitical consequences have been if Great Britain and American had accepted Himmlers unconditional surrender to the western allies?

6 upvotes

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What was it that isolated Southern China?

6 upvotes

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What sites would evoke imagination and wonder in a resident of the Incan Empire?

2 upvotes

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Was there any truth to the idea that, from a purely financial perspective, farming families were better off with as many children as possible?

1 upvotes

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Could somebody catch me up to our current scholarly understanding of Manichaeism?

1 upvotes

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Title	Upvotes	Mark as read	Favorited	Rating	Add to a list
In the Inferno, Dante places the Persion philosopher Ibn Sina in Limbo alongside other virtuous pagans. Was the idea that these Islamic intellectual figures were essentially good men who had the bad luck of being born into a non-Christian community a common way of understanding Muslim thinkers?	233
Arguably the greatest innovation Genghis Khan made to steppe warfare was the incorporation of Chinese siege units into his army. What was life actually like for these Chinese members of the horde? Would they have been treated as any other soldiers, or would they have been seen as glorified slaves?	112
Snobbish early Western scholars of China thought the logographic script was simple pictographs. The courts of classical China had no shortage of cultural elitism, and access to Sanskrit/Devanagari. Do Chinese sources ever present a similarly derisive view of phonetic scripts/Indo-European languages?	102
What would the geopolitical consequences have been if Great Britain and American had accepted Himmlers unconditional surrender to the western allies?	6
What was it that isolated Southern China?	6
What sites would evoke imagination and wonder in a resident of the Incan Empire?	2
Was there any truth to the idea that, from a purely financial perspective, farming families were better off with as many children as possible?	1
Could somebody catch me up to our current scholarly understanding of Manichaeism?	1