Technological and Cultural achievements of Non-Romans

[Ibrahim]

Er... No. Julius Caesar may have made a big dent in Gaul's population, but the Romans never attempted to replace or marginalize the Gauls. Why would they? So the situation is not comparable to the colonization of the new world (and the Anglo-Saxons were hardly the only ones to mistreat the Native Americans).

And yes, I quite agree that the using the word genocide for the Classical world is misplaced.

For the record: IIRC Terry Jones only uses the word genocide in the context of the conquest of Dacia. This based on the facts that Roman authors claimed very few Dacians survived Trajan's conquest and Dacia was strongly Romanized while being one of the most short-lived Roman provinces. But that's hardly conclusive evidence, and even Jones admits that his argument is shaky. Following the conquest Dacian auxiliaries were posted all over the empire: to me this suggests an strong push to integrate the Dacians into the empire rather than an attempt to empty their homeland.

The OP contains several statements that could do with more evidence, but let's keep this discussion civil.

Terry did indeed say that the claim was likely exaggerated, and may even have been referring to the destruction of the dacian nobility. he mentioned that the Romans said that only 40 dacians or sth survived. that's obviously not true, since the Romans (as you ourself say), posted Dacian Auxilliaries. though that does raise a question: how on earth did the Romans impose a complete cultural and linguistic 180 on Dacia, if they didn't completely destroy the population itself? there aren't even as many dacian words in Romanian as one would expect them to have, as germanic languages ended up doing to latin in Gaul.

EDIT: the videos of the guy are here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...0674011842168#