This question is not meant to imply that they weren't; I simply was not alive then and do not know. But the rhetoric often used is that everything would be perfect if we would go back to the time of Reagan.

I've heard answers to this question that run the gamut from "Christianity was the chief cause of the Roman Empire's fall" to "Christianity had nothing to do with it and the timing was purely coincidental". Could an expert on Roman history and/or historical Christianity like /u/Ambarenya, /u/caustic_banana, or /u/LegalAction please clear this up for me? Thank you!

Were there any myths or legends passed down of an empire to the east? What did travellers record about ruins in Anatolia?

Ditto for using cannons to find corpses

I am currently reading River of Darkness, and one thing that wasn't mentioned was how the first two waves of Spanish explorers even got to Peru to begin with!

The book makes mention of sailing to and resupplying in Panama, but doesn't mention anything about the second leg of the journey from Panama to Peru.

So how would these explorers have completed that second leg? Would they march overland from Panama to Peru? Or was there a river/early canal wide enough for their ships? Or did they march to the Pacific coast of Panama and build new ships there? Or maybe they just sailed around the Southern tip of South America and I didn't realize it? Help me out here!

Recently ive been doing a little reading into the Korean War. People seem to view a modern conflict of China or Russia vs the US as basically an apocalyptic scenario, yet we had a China+Russia+North Kora vs UN+US+Britain+South Korea war less than 70 years ago and it has been mostly forgotten. Its like all the powers formally agreed to only fight in this one little area and then just go back home like nothing happened. How did this conflict not escalate into an all out assault on China and possibly a third World War? Sorry if it seems like a super vague question, but like i mentioned earlier, the same forces in a conflict in modern times is pretty much accepted as the end of the world, yet when this actually happened, it was so inconsequential that we dont even talk about it in school.

Would Swiss, Spanish or jews from not non persecuting allies such as Finland be able to travel freely trough the Nazi occupied territories? Or would they be a victim to constant harrasment? As a matter of fact, was it even possible for them to travel?

Why didn't they just boil the water like the Chinese did? Surely it can't be so hard to observe that drinking boiled water = not getting diarrhoea and dying of dehydration?

Would they be disbanded or would they continue to guard and patrol? what would happen?

So, as I understand this, the Romans did a fairly solid job of destroying most of the Gaelic Druids, destroying their groves and killing the druids when they could capture them. A lot of damage was done to some major places of gathering in Whales as well, if I remember correct. My question though is, what happened to the druids in Ireland?

Rome never really did much there in terms of conquest, so they sure were not out there killing druids like in other places of conquest, so what happened? Was it simply an older faith that was lost when Christianity started to spread there? The lack of written language and tradition, the tribal concept of the island, was it all simply washed up when missionaries arrived and started to convert the people?

Thank you for the help in my better understanding of this.

What sort of conditions (social, environmental, demographic, cultural and so on) lead to city-states forming in an area. Why do they tend to form rather than territorial states and other forms of organization? Why did places like Classical Greece, Renaissance Italy and the East African coast develop clusters of city-states when other places like China and Northern Europe did not?

We all know the legend, but I'm wondering if any archaeologies from the Roman period or later managed to find anything from Elephant feces, bones, or footprints in Southern France or the Alps.

I imagine that at one point or another Romans or others living in the Alps must have taken a skull or tusks off a dead elephant, maybe put them up in their houses, talked about them. Supposedly hundreds of Elephants died in the crossing, there must have been some remains.

If we're talking about modern times in principle the snow might have preserved the remains of some of Hannibal's elephants? Maybe in the course of time Germanic tribesmen, Napoleon's soldiers, or others probably collected any remains that were still there, but I cant seem to find any record of anybody finding one of Hannibal's elephants in the mountains.

Whereas the Praetorian Guard later became infamous for its disloyalty, as far as I could tell from my reading the Varangians were surprisingly loyal. I tried searching, but I couldn't find an instance of the Varangian Guard murdering a sitting Emperor. I did find a few references to the fact that they wouldn't avenge a murdered Emperor from John Norwich: "Alive they would have defended him to the last breath: dead there was no point in avenging him. They had a new master now."

Have the Varangians simply been hyped up or are the claims of their loyalty and reliability substantiated?

Were there tensions between the locals and the empire (like before the American Revolutionary War) or was it purely an economical decision? It doesn't make much sense to me, why would an empire give up so much land inhabited mainly by people so culturally close to Britain? How serious was the idea of an "imperial federation"? Why didn't Britain try to keep at least a few of those big islands, some even uninhabited of Canada? I am very interested in where can I get more information about these issues.