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Title The uncertain past : probability in ancient history / edited by Myles Lavan, University of St Andrews, Scotland; Daniel Jew, National University of Singapore; Bart Danon, Universiteit Leiden
Published Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023
©2023

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Description 1 online resource (xiv, 307 pages) : illustrations
Contents Probabilistic modelling in ancient history / Daniel Jew and Myles Lavan -- Assessing the scale of property confiscation in the ancient Greek world / Emily Mackil -- Senators and senatorial wealth at Pompeii : reconstructing the local wealth distribution / Bart Danon -- The Roman coinage under the Antonines revisited : an economy of silver, not gold / Gilles Bransbourg -- Children and their impact on family finances in Roman Egypt / Paul V. Kelly -- The financial sustainability of grain funds : a model-based approach using Monte Carlo simulation / N. Solonakis, A. Toure and M. Elhouderi -- New approaches to the urban population and urbanization rate of the Roman Empire, AD 1 to 200 / J.W. Hanson
Summary Historians constantly wrestle with uncertainty, never more so than when attempting quantification, yet the field has given little attention to the nature of uncertainty and strategies for managing it. This volume proposes a powerful new approach to uncertainty in ancient history, drawing on techniques widely used in the social and natural sciences. It shows how probability-based techniques used to manage uncertainty about the future or the present can be applied to uncertainty about the past. A substantial introduction explains the use of probability to represent uncertainty. The chapters that follow showcase how the technique can offer leverage on a wide range of problems in ancient history, from the incidence of expropriation in the Classical Greek world to the money supply of the Roman empire
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (Cambridge Core, viewed on December 03, 2022)
Subject History, Ancient -- Mathematical models
History, Ancient -- Statistical methods
Uncertainty -- Mathematical models.
Probabilities.
probability.
Probabilities
Uncertainty -- Mathematical models
Form Electronic book
Author Lavan, Myles, 1977- editor.
Jew, Daniel, 1973- editor.
Danon, Bart, editor.
ISBN 9781009121873
1009121871
1009302043
9781009302043