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Rethinking Population in the Roman Empire |
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Thursday, 08 October 2009 |
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(via Jim West)
Researchers are rethinking the 1st century BC population of the Roman Empire.
The first century B.C. was one of the most culturally rich in the history of the Roman Empire - the age of Cicero, Caesar and Virgil. But as much as historians know about the great figures of this period of Ancient Rome, they know very little about some basic facts, such as the population size of the late Roman Empire.
Now, a group of historians has used caches of buried coins to provide an answer to this question.
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The model [developed by University of Connecticut theoretical biologist Peter Turchin and Stanford University ancient historian Walter Scheidel] using the coin distribution and less
controversial census data from earlier periods suggests that the
population of Rome did in fact decline after 100 B.C., suggesting the
census did likely begin to include women and children and that Ancient Rome wasn't substantially larger than historians had thought.
By these estimates the entire population of the Roman Empire - and not just its male population - was somewhere around 4 million to 5 million people by the end of the first century B.C.
This represents a 200% decrease in previous estimates of the empire's population during this period. Read more here.
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