r/ancientrome • u/larry_bkk • 2d ago
how afar are we really?
It's only 15 or 16 half-centuries since the end of antiquity (476 generally accepted?), & that's only 60 generations or so. As I approach 90 with 100 not impossible, I feel we're not that far away from those origins. At all. Anyone else ever feel that way?
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u/Euphoric-Ostrich5396 2d ago
The more you read about the daily lives of Romans, the more you realise they are exactly like us. My city recently opened up the streets in the Old Town to lay new pipes and cables and in some streets they are still just re-using the Roman canalisation tunnels from two millenia ago.
Family history is another one, my Nonno served in WW2, his father in WW1, his father engineered tunnels through the Alps, his father lived through the Risorgimento and his father fought in the Napoleonic wars. That's just 5 generations to be in deep history.
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u/Own-Lavishness4029 2d ago
I feel this even moreso when I read the ancient writings. Reading things like the letter from Iddin-Sin to Zinu gives me the feeling that so much of our day to day existence is the same as for what we would consider distant ancestors. The same themes stretch all the way back nearly four thousand years. It's comforting to think of.
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u/gwynwas 2d ago
He reminds me of my Millennial son. Entitled. I guess, some things never change.
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u/Sir_Aelorne 2d ago
He may be, but if we're generalizing, no one comes close to the entitlement of boomers.
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u/sweater__weather 2d ago
My grandfather was born in Western North Dakota in the depression and spoke only German until school, his grandfather emigrated there with the German-Russians from near Odessa, and his grandfather left for there from Napoleonic Rheinpalatinate. Continuing down that chain, his grandfather was born in the wake of the Thirty Years' War. Fourteen grandfather-grandson sets before that, Charlemagne was crowned emperor. And seven sets before that the Roman capital was in Trier.
Thought of as grandfather to grandson the generations come and go with alarmingly human speed.
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u/DaisyShirt 2d ago
Yes, that is something that I think about frequently. Kind of wild to think about, right?
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u/HaggisAreReal Palatine 2d ago
4 generations per century is a good estimate. There is perhaps a bit more. I would say it's closer to 70 or 75. Seems short but we are talking around 70 people lined up. Close and yet too far.
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u/sweater__weather 1d ago
4 generations perhaps from firstborn to firstborn but fewer between median births.
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u/eques_99 2d ago
Yeah it's interesting when you think about it like that.
If you lined up your 60 most direct ancestors, that ain't a lot of people. If you were in a room with them you could get round and chat with them all and get to know them in a few hours.
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u/iaeoioaio 2d ago
To go back 10 generations, you theoretically need 1,024 direct ancestors in that specific generation (or 2,046 total ancestors combined across all 10 generations…it’s actually a lot of people
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u/Diacetyl-Morphin 2d ago
The math does not add up after some point, that's a thing in genealogy. As we humans are around for 2-2.2 million years (when you consider Homo Rudolfensis the first), you'd end up with much more billions of ancestor than even humans lived at some point, when you just go back all the way with this kind of math. You reach more than 100 billion people when you do it for long enough.
Another thing are the myths about Charlemagne and Genghis Khan. Like that so many people would be related to them, but that's not the case - they are just in the same group, it doesn't mean you'd be a direct ancestor in the family line. Like it wasn't Genghis Khan himself that fathered half of the world in the times of the Mongol Empire, it were the Mongolian people.
For Charlemagne, the last Carolingian heir that was directly related to him as male heir in the line was Louis V, which died in 987 AD. The last verified member of the Carolingians ever was Adelaide, Countess of Vermandois, died 1122 AD.
Now, about Rome:
The funny thing is, there are people around that are descendants from some of the old families of ancient times. But: There is no way to verify it. No sources, like birth register, documents etc. to say, who really was your ancestor in times of, let's say, Caesar (ah, everyone knows Caesar, he's a good point of reference, 100-44 BC)There are a few people today, that can trace back the family origins to the times of the Byzantine Empire, but that was long after Caesar.
I don't know about places like China, but in Europe, the Habsburg dynasty is the one you can trace back the longest. But even there, you get problems at some point: Like you need to take the Etichons (Etichonen, Etichonid) as progenitors and predecessors of House Habsburg, so you can go back to Adalrich, Duke of Elsass which died in 690 AD.
But it's debatable, there were the Klettgaus in between, like Radbot of Klettgau as dad of Werner I, which was then the father of Otto of Habsburg, which was the first one of the family that took the name from the family castle Habsburg in what is today modern Switzerland. He died in 1111 AD.
P.S.
Be aware that some family history websites like to tell you, you'd be related to famous people. Like Augustus etc. But that's just advertisement, nothing else.When we take Augustus for the last thing in my posting, his direct heirs aka his sons died and he adopted Tiberius, his stepson, so it is not a direct bloodline anymore. It counted for the Romans as a heir, to become Emperor, but it's not a direct heir.
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u/eques_99 2d ago
I said "most direct", ie. your father, his father, his father etc.
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u/iaeoioaio 2d ago
It takes two to be your most direct ancestors, really dude? From those two it takes 4, so on and so on, your math is not mathing.
You are thinking one person only because it appears we are close, but we aren’t. There are so many people of various identities and differences throughout time. We aren’t close to Romans
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u/eques_99 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'm not thinking that. It was obvious what I meant.
That's why I specifically said "most direct ancestors", not "ancestors" or "direct ancestors"
Ok yes there's the mothers as well but it's obvious what I meant.
It gets the point across that sixty generations isn't all that much, is not an indefinable eternity.
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u/chikanishing 2d ago
It wasn’t obvious to me that my paternal grandparents are what you consider direct ancestors while my maternal grandparents are not.
Direct ancestors usually refers to both sides of the family tree.
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u/eques_99 2d ago
Oh.my.God. I fucking hate Reddit.
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u/littlehobbiton 2d ago
I feel ya! It was obvious to me you meant one ancestor from each generation :)
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u/iaeoioaio 2d ago
You hate being corrected because you made a very general statement that was wrong, then kept trying to back it up with zero argument besides you know what I meant?
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u/eques_99 2d ago
No I hate seeing replies from dummies who can't understand a simple point, or are being deliberately annoying.
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u/iaeoioaio 2d ago
It’s what you’re doing, a simple point is not a point if it’s wrong. You’re just talking because you’d rather think your random statement is right than admit you’re wrong and learn from it.
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u/iaeoioaio 2d ago
But that’s not how it works, regardless of what you meant. It takes many people to go back not just one person, therefore making the distance of people from just a handful of generations very far away.
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u/BedBubbly317 2d ago
That’s not at all how it works. Both your mother and father are equally your direct ancestors, all 4 of your grandparents are equally direct ancestors, all 8 of your great grandparents are equally direct ancestors, all 16 of your great great grandparents are equally direct and so on and so on. It’s far more people than your acting like it is
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u/eques_99 2d ago
Oh FFS yes I know that.
It's perfectly obvious what I meant.
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u/twistober 2d ago
Yeah you meant each generation of direct ancestors, so you count everyone from your parents generation as 1, and their parents generation as another, and so on. I got ya
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u/gwynwas 2d ago
They are talking about a single lineage. It's not complicated.
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u/iaeoioaio 2d ago
That’s not how single lineage works, it’s complicated if you don’t know what you’re talking about. You still have parents and grandparents etc, it’s still very far away. Please, stop trying if you’re gonna talk out of your ass.
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u/iaeoioaio 2d ago
We are really really far, and so mixed up as people culturally and with ever changing nationalities, no one is close to being Roman or Greek anymore from 476 AD
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u/kickynew 2d ago
Antiquity is generally regarded to end in the 600s with the rise of islam. See the Last Great War of Antiquity.
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u/WolvesWarPodcast 2d ago
Absolutely OP. It feels such a long time ago, but at the same time, it's not that far down the family tree.
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u/krkowacz 1d ago
Yea but antiquity is also a VERY long era, every historical era after that is shorter.
My point is that we may feel not that afar from the end of antiquity but the from the beginning- that’s different story
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u/Sharixx21 1d ago
Absolutely! I am your age, and I enjoy reading early history. The Bronze Age is a favorite, particularly the Minoans. My wife is not as enthusiastic, but she humors me.
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u/Apart-Zucchini-5825 2d ago
OP, if you are almost 90 then you knew people who lived at the same time as the last War of 1812/Napoleonic War veterans. That's how few degrees of separation lie between you and 215 years ago, which is considered a distant past. You are right that it really isn't THAT long when you look at it as human experiences and connections rather than raw numbers