askhistorians

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By what process were free peasants of Antiquity reduced to serfdom in the Medieval period? Was there any resistance to the erosion of rights?	44
Much of the Balkans once spoke Latin but now speak Slavic languages. In areas where Slavic nobles ruled this is understandable - but what happened in Ragusa/Dubrovnik? How did a Romance-speaking population with strong commercial ties to Italy end up changing its language to Croatian?	44
Why do cougars/mountain lions not feature more often in colonial American iconography and art? Why wasn't a large cat considered an impressive beast?	43
What is the largest subject population Rome ever acquired in a war? Did Rome ever struggle with enforcing its laws and extracting taxes from an area after it had officially conquered it?	42
When was the consensus reached in Judaism that prophecy was a thing of the past?	39
Did the Islamic daily prayers have any equivalent in Judaism or Christianity at the time of early Islam in terms of the repetition of fixed body positions - standing, bowing, prostration?	38
Alexander the Great's hair cut is pretty iconic and apparently was very influential with Hellenistic kings... But where did it come from? Did Alexander naturally have really good hair? Did he have a reason for keeping his hair the way he did?	34
It's been a decade, but I recall in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers he makes an argument akin to East Asian work ethic being an outgrowth of rice farming, since the return on rice farming is apparently proportional to the effort put in. Do historians consider this valid?	33
The Roman elite liked to go around clean shaven, but what about non-elites? Did they shave daily, whether at home or at a barber? Was attending the barber daily affordable?	33
Is Attila the Hun's presence in Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied and his death there-in representative of an oral tradition of rumors that spread from his death at his wedding or was there interplay between written accounts with folkloric accounts before these legends were fixed in writing?	31

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