Talk:Indo-Roman relations

This article is not complete

I apologise: This article is not complete - I started it today but got quite sick - so I had to leave it midstream - but I will get back and finish it as quickly as I can. Sincerely, John Hill (talk) 08:52, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Proposal to merge with Roman trade with India

I began this article on "Indo-Roman relations" recently because it was listed on the WikiProject Indian History page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Indian_history) as an "Open Task". It is still an uncompleted article which I should expand.

Unfortunately, I was not aware until today that there is already a substantial article on Roman trade with India and there is, not surprisingly, a great deal of overlap - particularly as little is known about Indo-Roman relations other than what can be deduced from the trade plus a few short references in Roman and India literature. I cannot see how one can write an article about Indo-Roman relations without a detailed study of the trade.

I propose combining the information in both articles into a new article headed "Indo-Roman trade and relations". I would very much appreciate any comments or suggestions from other editors. Many thanks, John Hill (talk) 08:49, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

The presence of Romans in India and the relations between Rome and India are still generally little known or understood. Unfortunately, we lack the sort of accounts or 'histories' written by contemporaries or near-contemporaries which we have for, say, the earlier conquests of Alexander in India, to provide us with some sort of overview. While we have quite extensive and spectacular literary, numismatic and archaeological evidence, it is difficult to assemble anything approaching a comprehensive picture of the relations between India and the Roman Empire. Instead, we must build up a mosaic of many bits of evidence, mainly relating to the trade between them, and then try to 'join the dots' to produce a plausible story.

It 's really good starting point and this captures the problem. I see that there is another similar article in wikipedia it would be nice to merge them and to use this incipit. In this argument it is very difficult to use secondary sources because it is a new argument re-discovered from recent globalization and we have often only few primary source and analogy.

If our civilization will end, between 2000 years, what could find an archaeologist on the trade between the U.S. and China? Private contability documents are destroyed every ten years, and state records are kept only in case of civilization continuity. The plastic and the iron-cement will be destroyed in 300-400 years. And our cities can be fall down into 5-10 meters underground. Our houses will be destroyed in 200 years. Only few monuments remains. The XIX century and after chemical paper (I worked in archive) without maintenance in 300 years will be destroyed. The tissue paper of XVI century is better. Our Iron ships will be consumed in few centuries. And it will remain very very little things surely the Egyptian pyramids if the religious fanaticism will not destroy them. Our skyscrapers without maintenance in 100 years will be a little hills of 10-20 meters high. This is the situation that we have about Roman and Hellenistic civilization. Today in Rome is hard to think to be more different from the ancients. The ancient romans had all our comforts, air pollution included, (except TV and electrical light but they had more thermae, and more theaters and arenas and spaces for socialization). The city has reached the ancient population only in 1950. While (the old Venices) Aquileia and Altino today are 3 meters under the mud.

Perhaps a fishermen will find into a caked mud an Ipad miraculously survived that is will be exposed in a museum... as the Antikythera mechanism.  ;-)

--84.223.59.26 (talk) 09:42, 18 February 2011 (UTC) Andriolo