Awesome book. Students were already gaming the system as extremists in 1200 Paris.

> (the cleric students were) marked by the tonsure, which granted them two major privileges:

> the privilegium canonis, protected their persons, which were regarded as sacred. Any physical violence against them entailed excommunication, which could only be lifted after severe penance. One did not mistreat a cleric without exposing oneself to serious consequences.

> The second was the privilegium fori, which placed clerics under the sole jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts... Philip Augustus is said to have observed the boldness of clerics who rushed into the fray brandishing swords, yet wearing neither armour nor helmets. Hardly surprising, when a shaved head offered better protection than a helmet.

> the students of Paris threatened a general strike

Paris in 1200 was at least somewhat recognizable.

I actually was about to post this quote for another reason as well. Usually you make these references to “known sizes” so people can relate. But no one has seen Napoleon in the flesh _and_ they underestimate his size. This was a useless comparison.

That said, the dig itself is pretty cool and I’m excited to see what they’ll unearth. I’m pretty interested in Roman history but haven’t gone as deep into the history of the provinces.

Semi-related to that, if someone reading this is in the Toronto area, the bata shoe museum has an exhibit (Vindolanda) about unearthed Roman footwear in England

The author should’ve known that we already have an accepted unit for measuring things in terms of a person’s stature:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot

Or about 1/27th of a football field for the Americans

> It's surprising that they're not doing that systematically around the building

There's a very good reason for that: archaeological techniques improve all the time. The idea here is to leave something for future archaeologists.

By not excavating the whole city they leave work for future archaeologists. :)

> It's surprising that they're not doing that systematically around the building, but then again I guess that applies to a large part of the city as well.

In some places in Italy, Greece, Malta, probably others I don't know, people always joke that you shouldn't try to ever do any renovations lest you end up finding something and lose your house. Some places you're almost guaranteed to find stuff if you just dig once or twice.

> One always wonders which incredible books we lost, from amazing mysterious old philosophers.

You might be interested in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, a historical novel about such a lost work.

Excavation with our soon-to-be-outdated techniques is needless destruction.

We should only excavate what is about to be destroyed.

( And we shouldn't destroy stuff just to put up yet another shitty modern building. )

Not to engage in whataboutism, but every major power or even near-peer power has engaged in those types of atrocities. We like to talk about international law, but anyone who has paid attention understands that the only international law that exists is power.

I wish it were different, but the language they spoke back then was conquest, and every nation and ethnicity spoke that language, and embraced it. And they weren't just unaliving people. They were having their way with the women and unaliving the male children. The Arabs did this. The Persians did this. The Europeans did this. The Asians did this. Everyone.

There's a reason why 0.5% of the male global population today has Genghis Khan's DNA.

I'm not white, but it boggles my mind how modern society has been so radicalized and brainwashed that a particular segment of our population actually thinks white people are the only people in history that have done this.

But yeah, the French...

Go on then. Nobody's stopping you.

Can we talk about the Spanish instead? They killed more.

That’s been talked about ad nauseam. It’s nice to talk about something else for a change.

yes we can.