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YOU CANT PROVE THAT
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May 16, 2024 04:24
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This popped into my head with regard to the human sacrifice discussion so pardon if it's not entirely coherent: Something being "taboo" seems incredibly vague, at what point does something become taboo or vice versa in historical study? Like interracial marriage in the US was very taboo across most of it for a long time and now it's more accepted in large swaths of the population. Is it now "taboo but in this niche" or still "taboo"? Obviously when we're looking back at something like that Carthage/Roman spat it's harder temporally but obviously someone has to make a judgement call. What kind of guidance in the field is there for that kind of call?
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May 16, 2024 17:01
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Synnr posted:This popped into my head with regard to the human sacrifice discussion so pardon if it's not entirely coherent: It was not just taboo, it was codefied in law until mere decades ago.
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May 16, 2024 20:04
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Shampoo didn't even reach Europe until the 19th century when Dean Mahomed, the same guy who opened the first Indian restaurant in Britain, brought it with him from home and marketed it as "medicinal" as most things were in those days.
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May 16, 2024 20:08
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It had never crossed my mind before but I guess that explains the extremely non-english sounding term
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May 16, 2024 20:10
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Did most people just wash their hair with bar soap I see...
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May 16, 2024 20:10
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I've been told horse piss was very popular in some places as a sort of conditioner.
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May 16, 2024 20:19
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Synnr posted:This popped into my head with regard to the human sacrifice discussion so pardon if it's not entirely coherent: It is vague. “Taboo” in the modern sense is a semantic drift away from Polynesian loanword for a concept which the British colonial guys (and academic successors) who picked up the word did not have anymore. The idea of something being so sacred it is wholly off-limits did not land with modern westerners who instead use it mostly to mean “really bad thing” without considering the funny implications of referring to interracial sex (or whatever else) as “taboo”. Ironically the ancient Greeks and Romans would have perfectly understood this concept as “agia”/ “sacer” respectively.
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May 16, 2024 20:30
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I'm reading Shogun, after watching Shogun, and I get that Clavell is probably massively overplaying the ritualistic aspects of interpersonal interactions in the sengoku jidai, but it did make me wonder what other societies had such strict standards about propriety and etiquette and did any reach the level of the society portrayed in that book. The follow-up is how those rules of etiquette and decorum are established. I know that there are some famous stories involving cross cultural faux pas, like Vlad Tepes nailing the turbans to the heads of ottoman envoys, and I seem to recall a similar anecdote involving Genghis Khan. Are such thing apocryphal or unusual in history?
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May 16, 2024 20:42
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zoux posted:Did most people just wash their hair with bar soap if youre black you dont want to use shampoo a lot
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May 16, 2024 23:01
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There's a fair few hair textures where shampoos are more destructive than helpful and you're better off even doing something silly like "using a small amount of soap like once a month"
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May 16, 2024 23:11
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zoux posted:I'm reading Shogun, after watching Shogun, and I get that Clavell is probably massively overplaying the ritualistic aspects of interpersonal interactions in the sengoku jidai, but it did make me wonder what other societies had such strict standards about propriety and etiquette and did any reach the level of the society portrayed in that book. The follow-up is how those rules of etiquette and decorum are established. I know that there are some famous stories involving cross cultural faux pas, like Vlad Tepes nailing the turbans to the heads of ottoman envoys, and I seem to recall a similar anecdote involving Genghis Khan. Are such thing apocryphal or unusual in history? I think a lot of royal courts and aristocracies wind up with these kinds of dynamics. Looking both at Louis XIV's Versailles and at Charles II's court, there was a ton of subtle signalling and ritualized interaction. The Victorian era is infamous for things like communicating via flower displays and corsages. The big thing with Shogun, and both Western and Japanese media about the Sengoku Jidai, is that it pushes a lot of the ritual and dynamics from the Tokugawa shogunate to an earlier period where things were actually pretty different. Elaborate tea ceremonies, honor duels, and even Noh theater are actually relatively recent and emerge from the long peace under the Tokugawa shoguns, where an empowered and enriched samurai class didn't have any wars to fight and had to find other things to occupy their time. Even seppuku, the most famous quirk of samurai honor culture, doesn't really get codified until the very end of the Sengoku Jidai, and again is more a thing you see during the Edo period. The shogunate and the Edo samurai class all believed that this stuff was very old; it's a huge part of their propaganda and functioned both as a way for the shogun to control the samurai, and a way for samurai to maintain their martial airs. But it was always a bit of a mirage. Now the Imperial court has had crazy ritualized stuff associated with it for a thousand years, but it functioned as more of a religious institution for a lot of that time so that isn't surprising.
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May 17, 2024 00:12
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There’s a famous memoir of Louis XIV’s court by the Duc de Saint-Simon which is supposed to be all about that poo poo. There’s translated version in public domain. Its all an intensely boring dudes petty rant and I couldn’t make it through it tbh, but read it if you want to be disabused of the notion that there is anything fun or romantic about the aristocracy of yore
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May 17, 2024 00:19
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Samuel Pepys 'diaries are a similar window into that kind of world, but sound a lot more fun. Pepys loved a scandal so was constantly writing about who was shtupping who, along with the very valuable but sometimes tedious minutiae of court life.
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May 17, 2024 00:22
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Do we know what people living in modern Iraq would have considered their ethnic identity on the eve of the Arab conquests? Just occurred to me that while the population would primarily self-identify as Arab today, Baghdad was originally viewed as a less Arab dominated site than Damascus, and I'm curious what the locals would have identified as. Had the majority adopted a Persian identity by that point?
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May 17, 2024 07:24
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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SlothfulCobra posted:Yeah technically there's a lot still lying around because when Islam got underway with conquering lots of territory, it made a point of not forcibly wiping out a lot of competing religions, they just gave other religious communities an extra tax, so they stuck around as enclaves within the Muslim world. Trying to convert Muslims was actually the one thing that would get you in big, big trouble, though (you the converter and also the convertee).
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May 17, 2024 13:31
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FishFood posted:Samuel Pepys 'diaries are a similar window into that kind of world, but sound a lot more fun. Pepys loved a scandal so was constantly writing about who was shtupping who, along with the very valuable but sometimes tedious minutiae of court life. I was following that old twitter account that did an entry a day for a while and it's hilarious that Pepys kept using the world's worst code to describe his numerous sexual adventures. "Went with maid M into the closet and there I did tocar her" yeah buddy no one's gonna crack that.
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May 17, 2024 13:45
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Benagain posted:I was following that old twitter account that did an entry a day for a while and it's hilarious that Pepys kept using the world's worst code to describe his numerous sexual adventures. "Went with maid M into the closet and there I did tocar her" yeah buddy no one's gonna crack that. Well remember his diary is in shorthand already, so the MS is not open-legible in the first place. The best reading of I've seen his use of Spanish/French/Italian words for sex is that it's a style/self-image/sophistication thing, like using French words for cuisine (cuisine!) to make it more fashionable - one scholar put it something like "it's not shame - he's dressing up his sexuality in a little italian hat"
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May 17, 2024 13:50
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zoux posted:I'm reading Shogun, after watching Shogun, and I get that Clavell is probably massively overplaying the ritualistic aspects of interpersonal interactions in the sengoku jidai, but it did make me wonder what other societies had such strict standards about propriety and etiquette and did any reach the level of the society portrayed in that book. The follow-up is how those rules of etiquette and decorum are established. I know that there are some famous stories involving cross cultural faux pas, like Vlad Tepes nailing the turbans to the heads of ottoman envoys, and I seem to recall a similar anecdote involving Genghis Khan. Are such thing apocryphal or unusual in history? I think being a dick to ambassadors is one of those universal cultural faux pas.
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May 17, 2024 15:06
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CommonShore posted:Well remember his diary is in shorthand already, so the MS is not open-legible in the first place. The best reading of I've seen his use of Spanish/French/Italian words for sex is that it's a style/self-image/sophistication thing, like using French words for cuisine (cuisine!) to make it more fashionable - one scholar put it something like "it's not shame - he's dressing up his sexuality in a little italian hat" super mario sexual odyssey
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May 17, 2024 15:19
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PC port of Ghost of Tsushima dropped yesterday too I’m the most samurai pilled man in America
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May 17, 2024 15:19
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How's the optimization?
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May 17, 2024 15:26
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Really good, same people that did the HFW port
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May 17, 2024 15:27
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Question for the thread that I'll phrase as a brainstorm/what-if game: You are given the assignment of designing a method of burying/preserving human remains. The objective is to maximize preservation of these remains for archaeologists in the future. You may offer proposals for different optimizations (cost not a factor; cost efficiency; feasibility or viability) and different time scales (100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10000+ years), and to address different problems in preservation (weather, looting, geology, etc). Any variables are acceptable to consider - e.g. if you can ship the remains anywhere in the world, or if you have to deal with local conditions.
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May 20, 2024 16:17
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CommonShore posted:Well remember his diary is in shorthand already, so the MS is not open-legible in the first place. The best reading of I've seen his use of Spanish/French/Italian words for sex is that it's a style/self-image/sophistication thing, like using French words for cuisine (cuisine!) to make it more fashionable - one scholar put it something like "it's not shame - he's dressing up his sexuality in a little italian hat" Oh man that's so much better thank you
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May 20, 2024 16:27
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CommonShore posted:Question for the thread that I'll phrase as a brainstorm/what-if game: Drop them in a bog
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May 20, 2024 16:56
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build some more pyramids
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May 20, 2024 17:01
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At a few decades-long timespan, your best bet would be desiccation followed by cryogenic storage in a temperature and humidity-controlled vault that can be monitored and secured. On a multi-century timespan where interference is more of a concern than decay, it likely would be safer to put them up into space and store them at a Lagrange point. If cost is a concern, then you’re probably looking at replicating the sort of super stable conditions that archeologists have focused on throughout history: remote and oxygen-deprived bogs, hidden desert tombs, sealed and chemically-embalmed coffins, or with the use of non-biological replications (anything from death masks and gravestones to video testimonies and autopsy reports).
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May 20, 2024 17:14
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Give 'em the old Horatio Nelson.
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May 20, 2024 17:41
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CommonShore posted:Question for the thread that I'll phrase as a brainstorm/what-if game: Send them off at constant 1g acceleration to some star and have them come back
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May 20, 2024 17:45
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CommonShore posted:Question for the thread that I'll phrase as a brainstorm/what-if game: Isn’t the most important thing here that they need to be buried with something at all? Even if, say, Jeff Bezos decides he wants to have his body last forever and gets embalmed like Lenin, Jeff in a suit doesn’t tell anyone very much when he gets dug up in 2,000 years. As far as I know individual bodies without deposited goods are not terribly useful for archeology unless you get enough of them that you can get an idea of biological traits like height, now things like diet, etc.
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May 20, 2024 18:14
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time capsules: a cultural history by w.e. jarvis notes that peeps absolutely hate the contents of purpose-buried time capsules, they have this distinct tendency to hold remarkably little of interest
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May 20, 2024 18:18
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Whatever they did for Tutankhamen seems to have worked until that dasterdly Bristish guy disturbed his grave
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May 20, 2024 18:20
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Flappy Bert posted:Isn’t the most important thing here that they need to be buried with something at all? Even if, say, Jeff Bezos decides he wants to have his body last forever and gets embalmed like Lenin, Jeff in a suit doesn’t tell anyone very much when he gets dug up in 2,000 years. As far as I know individual bodies without deposited goods are not terribly useful for archeology unless you get enough of them that you can get an idea of biological traits like height, now things like diet, etc. not for archaeology, but I suspect future people/aliens could do some really dope tissue analysis on a well preserved body.
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May 20, 2024 18:26
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My main goal in life is to leave an interesting skeleton and confusing grave goods. A sword, a weird mishmash of coins, some contradictory religious symbols or totems, maybe a scroll or two, and so on and so forth. Make it a real hassle for the pallbearers to carry my casket.
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May 20, 2024 18:40
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bob dobbs is dead posted:build some more pyramids
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May 20, 2024 19:11
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Italians are stereotyped to be a very passionate people, french are stereotyped to be a very passionate and emotional, Spaniards are stereotyped to be very passionate and emotional. The cultures which descend from the latin language and were the heartland of the western roman empire are all stereotyped as being passionate and emotional. Was this something that Romans were known for in the ancient world? What were the stereotypes civilizations and regions had of each other in the ancient world?
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May 21, 2024 03:06
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Encase in a perorated aluminium capsule (highly polished), put into a cometary orbit.
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May 21, 2024 03:25
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:Italians are stereotyped to be a very passionate people, french are stereotyped to be a very passionate and emotional, Spaniards are stereotyped to be very passionate and emotional. The cultures which descend from the latin language and were the heartland of the western roman empire are all stereotyped as being passionate and emotional. Was this something that Romans were known for in the ancient world? What were the stereotypes civilizations and regions had of each other in the ancient world? I'm really working off JE Lendon and Bret Deveraux here (as I do so often) Not sure what e.g. Carthaginians thought of Romans, but for what Romans thought of other people we have quite a bit. The basic gist is that Romans viewed virtus as the best thing for a person to have: its basically the ability to act violently and decisively, to just loving JUMP on hard challenges and face danger and so on, sometimes translated as "courage" but usually it seems way more intense/hot than the way we use courage in 21st century English. This attribute had to be held in check by other Roman virtues, such as disciplina, the ability to stay calm and rational under pressure and listen to orders and work with others. Anyway, the Roman view in very, very broad strokes was that barbarians to their north and west - Gauls, Germans - had too much virtus and were not tempered by disciplina, while barbarians to their south and east - Greeks, Persians - had disciplina but didn't have enough virtus.
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May 21, 2024 03:39
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You would probably like the entirity of Herodotus
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May 21, 2024 03:39
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