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I was surprised recently by how cheaply you can acquire ancient coins. You can buy a coin struck right after the death of Constantine and bearing his visage for $30.
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Mar 29, 2020 21:50
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If Rome generally allowed conquered peoples to continue their religious practices, why were Druids in Gaul and Britain suppressed? Did it have to do with the Celtic beliefs, or was the the Druidic priesthood itself seen as a threat to Roman rule?
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Mar 30, 2020 05:24
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chitoryu12 posted:Funny enough, Rome and China knew of each other. There was actually an attempted Chinese expedition west that could have reached Rome as early as 97 AD, but the sailors at an unknown sea (possibly the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, or Black Sea) and told him that it would be extremely treacherous to cross and he gave up. The Romans had vague knowledge of the existence of silk-producing peoples far east but hadn't ventured far enough to find them, while the Chinese had secondhand accounts of Rome's existence. It's believed that the first successful expedition of Romans to China arrived in 166. It tickles me that the ancient Chinese name for the Roman Empire was Daqin, or “Great China”.
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Mar 31, 2020 04:49
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sullat posted:Probably because the Han dynasty wanted to derive legitimacy from the Romans! Seriously though, isn't the classical Chinese name for China Zhong Guo, not Qin? My understanding is that the country’s name changed based on the ruling dynasty. It has been called Tangchao (Tang Dynasty), Daming (Great Ming), etc. As for why they chose to call the Roman lands they encountered “Great China”, it seems to me that they were simply trying to find a name for this large, organized “kingdom” and only the state of Qin served as a worthy analogue. This passage by the ambassador Gan Ying c.97 CE is the best kind of historical description, one that is highly idealized and based wholly on second-hand information: quote:
Kevin DuBrow fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Mar 31, 2020 |
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Mar 31, 2020 05:15
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It is the convention in Bali, Indonesia to have a birth-order name and personal name. The most common are: First born: Wayan or Putu Second: Made, Kadek Third: Nyoman, Komang Fourth: Ketut These names are for either gender. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of Wayans and Putus and not as many Ketuts. I’m sure other cultures have names based on birth order as well. The Japanese name Ichiro most commonly means “first son”.
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Apr 3, 2020 20:10
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A neat development was that Thucydides’ account of the plague, which he claimed to have contracted himself, was uncorroborated until a mass grave thought to have held over 200 people, almost half of them children, was discovered in Athens in the 90’s. The bodies were placed haphazardly and all within two days, and artifacts in the grave were dated to the time period. Tragically, the archeological dig was rushed because the city was building a subway system. The grave, along with 1,000 tombs from 400-500 BCE, were destroyed to make way for it. The subway route was later cancelled and they built a parking lot on top of the hole  .Also interesting from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is he writes that when the Peloponnesians marched up to lay siege to the city, they saw the mass funerals and received accounts from Athenian deserters about the plague, went “nope not touching that”, and withdrew to attack the countryside for the summer. Kevin DuBrow fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Apr 7, 2020 |
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Apr 7, 2020 19:08
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Are there any video games of any genre for any platform that are set either during the reign of Alexander the Great or during the immediate aftermath of his death? There’s the Diadochi Kings mod for Crusader Kings 2, but it’s in beta. As you would expect, it starts immediately after his death.
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Apr 27, 2020 22:57
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I like this video because it shows how tricky it is to aim sling shots, even at moderate ranges. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzDMCVdPwnE Kevin DuBrow fucked around with this message at 08:49 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 08:42
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I would like my body carried in procession through the streets of Rome before being set down at the forum, where my ambitious nephew will perform a skillful funeral oration, using the opportunity to emphasize his lineage from both the earliest kings of Rome and the gods themselves, foreshadowing his ascent to dictatorship twenty years later.
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May 16, 2020 19:43
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What’s some good reading on sexuality in ancient civilizations? I’m interested particularly in the idea that some cultures considered women to have a stronger sexual drive than men.
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May 21, 2020 23:57
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LingcodKilla posted:When I read the Iliad it felt like most of the combatants were nearly naked. Was cloth carried into wounds considered bad back then? The Greeks were big into heroic nudity. They didn’t actually go to battle naked. Roman and Greek sexuality are fascinating topics. “Infibulation” is mostly used today to refer to type III genital mutilation on women, but it can also refer to the ancient practice of clasping your foreskin shut. In Ancient Greece it appears that it was considered proper to hide the head of your penis when nude in public, which was accomplished by using the kynodesmē (dog tie/leash), a cord or leather thong that cinched the foreskin and pulled the penis upward, with the other end sometimes secured at the waist. They also considered longer foreskins with a distinctive taper to be more desirable, and short ones were pathologized. “Akroposthion” was a term for the part of the foreskin that reaches past the head of the penis and forms that sexy taper. Depictions of penises in vase painting emphasize this, sometimes to an unrealistic extent. This might be artistic liberty, or it might actually reflect foreskins that were elongated by constant use of the aforementioned kynodesmē.  Close-up of a kylix of Achilles binding Patroclus’ wounds, prominently featuring Patroclus’ foreskin draped over his foot.  Painting on an oinechoe which features a young man that somehow still has an unretracted, tapered foreskin despite his raging erection.  Another red-figure depiction of an athlete in the process of tying the kynodesmē around his akroposthion. Most of this information is from this great article: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/4718/pdf Kevin DuBrow fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 02:56
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An interesting idea, but I don't know if it's compelling enough evidence to declare the case closed. Isn't the earliest evidence of knitting dated hundreds of years after the time the dodecahedra are dated to?
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Jun 6, 2020 06:25
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Mr. Nice! posted:Reminder to read that and all Shakespeare like you're a Appalachian moonshiner. That's closer to what english sounded like back then than modern british english. It all flows so much better. It’s a popular misconception that Appalachian English is a remnant of Elizabethan English. It’s more accurate to see how it’s preserved parts of 18th century colonial dialect, although it does contain some archaisms that wouldn’t be amiss in Shakespeare’s works like “afeared” instead of “afraid”. What is true though is that American pronunciations in general are closer to 18th century British ones than modern British pronunciations are, especially because America preserved rhoticity while Britain didn’t. The evolution of the prestige associated with rhoticity vs non-rhoticity in the U.S. is interesting. Kevin DuBrow fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Jun 14, 2020 |
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Jun 14, 2020 20:06
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I would say Gamergate is what you would have to examine as the phenomenon that really turned anti-feminist, anti-pc internet users into political activism and created the environment in which major alt-right personalities like Milo found their followings. 4chan is a major part of that, but not more so than Twitter.
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Jun 25, 2020 19:00
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MORE TAXES WHEN posted:Huh. Restoration's always a funny thing. When I was at the Louvre they had a hall full of statues that got restored, but in ways which transformed the original. Like taking a statue they dug up and then slapping a lightning bolt on it and going "And now it's Jupiter!" - apparently back in the day that was a thing people did. I should drag some of those pictures off my phone. This happened a lot with Christians, notably Byzantine emperors, repurposing Greek and Roman art for Christian worship. The chalice of Abbot Suger is a nice example of transformed art.  The cup itself is from the 2nd or 1st century, B.C. Egypt and is carved from a single piece of sardonyx. A thousand years later, in about 1140, it found its way into the uber-rich abbot of the church of Saint-Denis in modern-day Paris, who had it modified to use during mass. He put it on a gilded silver mounting which features a Christ Pantakrator, which is interesting because it’s a nod to Byzantine iconography mixed with the more typically western Alpha-Omega (it’s an interesting topic in itself how those Greek letters were more common in Western Catholic rather than Eastern Catholic art). The final product is a mix of ancient and medieval, East and West. I saw the chalice in person at the National Gallery of Art in D.C. It’s beautiful, but I was immediately drawn to the original stone cup, which outshone the mounting in my eyes. It also had a neat story about being smuggled out of Paris during WW2 and being lost for decades . Kevin DuBrow fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Jun 26, 2020 |
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Jun 26, 2020 09:48
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Amgard posted:That or a rower on a ship. Chained in place for days on end, your body emaciated aside from giant arms, never seeing the sun. Also you're enslaved In Rome and Greece, free mariners were almost always used to row instead of galley slaves (despite that scene in Ben-Hur). They actually became more common in the medieval era. But there are quite few accounts of slaves being promised freedom for rowing or being freed right before being pressed into rowing duty. Rowing wasn’t just menial labor, they needed to be coordinated and disciplined. Kevin DuBrow fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Jun 26, 2020 |
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Jun 26, 2020 21:23
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I was wondering what proportion of the Roman population was directly involved in agriculture. I did a cursory search and some sources are saying ~90% but I'm not seeing how they've arrived at that estimate.
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Jul 7, 2020 22:50
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Do they still perform worship services in the mosque-turned-church at the Alhambra? I remember reading something a few years back about some Muslim visitors getting kicked out for trying to pray there. The Alhambra and the Hagia Sofia are both definitely on my bucket list.
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Jul 10, 2020 18:49
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This is medieval history (with some mentions of ancient Rome and Athens), but I don't see any thread closer to the subject than this one, so I thought I'd share some controversy about a recent New Yorker article. How Pandemics Wreck Havoc and Open Minds: "The plague marked the end of the Middle Ages and the start of a great cultural renewal. Could the coronavirus, for all its destruction, offer a similar opportunity for radical change?" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/how-pandemics-wreak-havoc-and-open-minds Personally, I don't think it's a very good article. It's a meandering mess that really reaches in places. But what raised the hackles of some medievalists is this passage: quote:Pomata told me, “What happens after the Black Death, it’s like a wind—fresh air coming in, the fresh air of common sense.” The intellectual overthrow of the scholastic-medicine establishment in the Middle Ages was caused by doctors who set aside the classical texts and gradually turned to empirical evidence. It was a revival of medical science, which had been dismissed after the fall of ancient Rome, a thousand years earlier. “After the Black Death, nothing was the same,” Pomata said. “What I expect now is something as dramatic is going to happen, not so much in medicine but in economy and culture. Because of danger, there’s this wonderful human response, which is to think in a new way." This letter in response gained some publicity, and summarizes the main faults with the article:  A New Yorker spokesperson responded to that letter last night with this statement: quote:Elly Truitt’s critique of our recent story “Crossroads” is off-base and, unfortunately, ignores the facts that were carefully laid out in the piece. We stand by the story.  Edit: whoops, don't know how to delete the attachment at the end Kevin DuBrow fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Jul 19, 2020 |
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Jul 19, 2020 05:08
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Tunicate posted:Isn't direct contact with bodily fluids infectious as well? I'd imagine that corpses would tend to splatter on impact Some people are using this article written by a microbiologist to defend the New Yorker piece. He suggests that it would have been transmitted to the people who carried the thrown bodies. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/9/01-0536_article Even if that’s true, the New Yorker article posits that the fleeing refugees were the cause of the spread throughout Italy, when maritime commerce, particularly grain shipments, would have been a much more important factor. https://osf.io/preprints/bodoarxiv/rqn8h/ edit: now that I’ve had the chance to read further into the second link I posted, I think it’s safe to say that it definitely wasn’t the flung bodies that caused the outbreak. Ironically, the war actually delayed the spread of plague into Caffa, and it’s likely that it was food shipments into the city once the siege was lifted that introduced it. It’s an excellent piece of scholarship and I’d definitely recommend reading it, it’s very cool that we’re still learning things that are flipping our old narratives on their heads. Anyway, here’s Pliny being Pliny. Book 28, chapter 23 of The Natural History. quote:Facts Connected With the Menstrual Discharge This is after reporting that a naked menstruating woman can scare away lightning, and that having sex with one will kill a man. Such power. Kevin DuBrow fucked around with this message at 12:00 on Jul 19, 2020 |
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Jul 19, 2020 11:23
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SlothfulCobra posted:And then Japan proclaims itself the third America after accepting the Californian refugees when the invincible walls of San Francisco are finally breached, but also British Columbia has somehow become culturally dominated by East Coasters and becomes known as Nyarkia. I get the analogy up till after the fall of Constantinople, can you spell it out please 
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Jul 25, 2020 05:20
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Marie Curie beat you to it by making her corpse so radioactive it's in a lead-lined coffin. Even her personal effects like papers or her cookbook require wearing protection before handling them.
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Aug 17, 2020 07:00
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I'm trying to find a piece of pre-Colombian art, I think from Mesoamerica and coming from a civilization older than the Aztecs. It's sort of a continual vertical scroll that I believe shows the impression that would be made from a cylindrical stamp that was rolled over clay. It depicts a figure with its mouth open to eat it's own bottom/feet and it was called something like "Earth goddess eating itself". Any ideas?
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Aug 24, 2020 19:13
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So Emperor Valerian was captured in battle by the Sassanids and lived in captivity until his death. But how believable are the reports from western sources that he was subjected to such indignities as being used as a footstool? I've read some primary sources written generations after his death, but haven't seen any Persian ones.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:32
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My favorite thing is when op-ed writers write a big piece trying to explain Chinese politics/society/foreign policy with like, Confucius or the construction of the Great Wall. Just imagining these people writing about how Italian sentiments towards the European Union really stem from the writings of Machiavelli
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Dec 14, 2020 04:17
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Reading on Muslim court politics I've come across a lot of fratricide especially among the ottomans, but I was still shocked reading about the sucession of the Ottoman Empire from Sultan Murad III to his son Mehmed III in 1595. After his burial, Mehmed summoned his nineteen half brothers to swear fealty. The oldest was eleven years old. After they all kissed his hand, he had them circumcised and then strangled with silk handkerchiefs.
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Jul 15, 2022 16:54
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Earlier in this thread there was a question about giving up either Greek or Latin when it comes to classical studies and most people laughed at the idea of choosing to keep Latin over Greek but I didn't quite get why it was an obvious choice. Is it a love for Greek drama and poetry or nerding out over the Eastern Roman Empire or what
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Jul 29, 2022 21:58
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Kind of reminds me of the Roman dodecahedron topic and when a woman posted a video of herself using it to knit some gloves some people saw it as proof that historians had this huge blind spot. It turns out that it probably wasn't a knitting device and like someone said above you shouldn't latch onto the first thing that makes sense to you.
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Jul 31, 2022 03:12
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I was learning about how in, say, medieval England, people kept pigs even in towns and cities and would let them go forage during the day. Laws were enacted involving issues such as pig curfews and who would bear responsibility if a pig caused damage. I was wondering at the end of the day would the pigs find their way home on their own, or would their owners have to go herd them back? Also, how were pigs marked for ownership?
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Feb 9, 2023 17:56
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I'm not familiar with him specifically but Giordano studied under Jusepe de Ribera. Much like Giordano's Chilon, Ribera did many paintings of "wise men" such as philosophers and saints, and his models for these were normal peasants and old men. He was known for not shying away from ugliness—wrinkles, fat, and dirt were depicted in a raw style. Sure Chiron looks ugly, but that reinforces the idea that he's a man who's lived a long life, experienced much and isn't concerned with his own beauty.
Kevin DuBrow fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Feb 21, 2023 |
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Feb 21, 2023 04:15
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