@gailyinthedark / gailyinthedark.tumblr.com
please stop writing "viscous" when you mean "vicious", it produces the weirdest mental images ever
"a viscous murder" yeah i don't want to know what that could look like
it looks like the Boston Molassacre of 1919
it looks like the Boston Molassacre of 1919
Food history has been so sanitized by the demonization of carbs. “Our ancestors only had fruits and veggies they didn’t have all these refined carbs” our ancestors drank beer 25/8 because the water was bad. Our ancestors drizzled honey on shit ever since we knew it existed. We’ve been making bread for our entire recorded history. It’s true that bleached sugars specifically are a new thing but high glycemic carbs are not new at all, we’ve been consuming them for thousands of years
Quick correction bc I see this myth everywhere.
People drank beer & fruit wine 25/8 because it was high in calories and also tasty and pretty cheap/easy to make in bulk.
The alcohol content in beer/wine back then was too low to actually sanitize anything effectively, and beer/wine only lasts for 6 months (usually less) even while still sealed in a cask, due to oxidization. Oxidation turns fermented liquids into vinegar. Wine and beer wasn’t meant for long-term storage.
This is great, because vinegar is the great preserver! VINEGAR is what people used to store their foods long-term, along with SALT and DRYING and SMOKING.
“Pickling” can be done with pure vinegar if you don’t have any expensive salt around, and vinegar can be made by fermenting any fruit or grain with wild yeast! If you’re lucky, you can also get wine/beer treats out of it on the way.
Circling back around: beer/wine was NEVER a replacement for water. Humans have been drinking from ground springs, wells, rainwater, and clear running water since our ape ancestors got the instinct to avoid stagnant pools.
If you didn’t have immediate access to a source of clean water, you didn’t fucking build a town there!
That’s a big reason why, WORLDWIDE, settlements are ALL historically clustered around sources of water like springs, wells, and rivers. (Or utilized rainwater catchment & storage) And why “the town well is poisoned/dried up!” Is a huge and terrible thing that comes up in a ton of old stories. Losing your source of freshwater means everyone has to move somewhere else, or die.
Even in huge cities, you’d be surprised at how sophisticated freshwater delivery systems were in the middle-ages. London had the “great conduit.” - a man-made, underground channel that moved water directly from a freshwater spring to fill a water tank in the Cheapside marketplace, accessible to the public. This conduit was built in 1245.
Mesopotamians in the BRONZE AGE built clay pipes for sewage removal, and other pipes for rain water collection, and wells. In 4,000 BC.
Building Aqueducts to move spring water into towns was first attributed to the Minoans, who lived in 2,000 BC.
Sanskrit texts from 2,000 BC also detail how to purify water you’re not sure about: expose it to Sunlight, filter it through Charcoal, dip a piece of copper in it at least 7 times, and filter it again. (UV treatment kills bacteria, Charcoal catches many poisons and heavy metal, copper is also antibacterial) <- even if they didn’t know what germs were, prehistoric humans were great at recognizing patterns, and noticing when people DIDNT die.
Persians in 700 BC used ‘qanat’, or tunnels dug into hillsides to let gravity move (CLEAN!) groundwater to nearby towns + for agriculture irrigation. Qanats were still the main water supply for the entire Iranian capitol city until about 1933.
The Roman Empire (312 BC) also built aqueducts to move spring and groundwater across miles and miles.
The Incas (1450) built wondrous examples of hydraulic engineering. Their “stairway of fountains” supplied the entire city of Machu Picchu with fresh spring water from a pair of rain-fed springs atop the mountain. The fountain canals could carry about 80 gallons a minute.
Getting clean drinking water was just not an issue for normal people in MOST long-term settlements. They may not understand germ theory, but they knew clean water was important and would kick up a BIG fuss if those water sources were sabotaged.
In many cultures, there were weak beers. They had names like small beer — they were specifically beers that had low alcohol because people knew that beer got you drunk and if you watered it down or re-brewed using previously used hops or barley or whatever, then you would get a beer that wouldn’t get you drunk.
Same with wines: there was get you drunk wine, and there was wind that you could drink a lot of. They were also cordial made by concentrating fruit juice, or historical drinks like Posca.
As far back is the Babylonian Empire they were making pastries out of dates and pistachios and flour.
Previous to that they probably were as well, but we don’t have any written records of it.
Literally as soon as somebody figured out that you could smash some high fat, high carb, high sugar stuffed together and bake it into something resembling cookies, they absolutely did.
So you should go and eat a cookie, because all of your ancestors spent a lot of time arranging the situation of civilisation to make sure that cookies were available. And if you don’t eat one then they’re going to be very sad
And so will you.
Also there’s a degree of Eurocentrism in the “everyone was drinking beer constantly” thing. In premodern Europe, yeah, beer was a very common beverage. This is absolutely not the case in all premodern societies.
Most cultures had some kind of intoxicant, yes, and in many cases an alcoholic beverage would be among the more common options (as @fuckingrecipes says, high in calories, tasty, & easy to make*), but by no means was everyone on the same page with consuming it recreationally or as an everyday part of their diet. Sometimes it was only for special occasions, or for ceremonial purposes, or just not that big a part of their lives.
* Beer is actually one of the more complicated ones, which might be why people used to thinking of it as the Default Booze assume there must have been a stronger driving force than “fun to get drunk” behind alcohol production. Grain is harder to ferment, but you can also make bread with it, in some regions it’s easier to grow in large quantities than fruits & such, and there are some state-building pressures behind mass grain cultivation that would take a while to get into. Fruit wines & ciders are dead easy, mead is practically naturally occurring, and palm wine is basically the instant microwave dinner of alcohol — you can tap a tree in the morning & get drunk off it in the afternoon.
And no, it was never about the water being unsafe to drink. (It’s theoretically possible that in some specific times & places this could have come up, but it’s not Why we have alcohol.) Just logistically, there’s no way to make that work. Even if you’re producing drinks with a high enough alcohol content to actually be sterile, which you probably aren’t without having access to more advanced distillation technology** than you’d need to just purify the water in the first place, you’re not going to have enough of that to replace all the water you’d normally drink. You’d have to dilute it again, and we’re back where we started. And even if you have the resources necessary to devise a system where you produce enough high-alcohol-content beverages to drink nothing else… well, I don’t know if you know this, but liquor is not great for hydration purposes, so you’d better put water back into your diet anyway. As a concept, it just doesn’t work once you think about it.
** Everyone say thank you to medieval Arabic alchemists for figuring out how to distill alcohol. Next time you crack open a bottle of whiskey or suchlike, raise a glass in the general direction of Baghdad and/or pour one out for the House of Wisdom.
Graffiti left on the tomb of Ramses V in Egypt by ancient greek tourists (when the tomb was only a few hundred years old). "I visited and did not like anything but the sarcophagus" and "I cannot read the hieroglyphs."
Cool article about it if you're interested.
The long, proud human history of replying to tweets and making them all about you
“I cannot understand the hieroglyphics”
“skill issue”
Tangentially related to the last rb but it is weird to me when people act like mixed race people just didn't Happen historically. Cause like, yeah the world used to be Less connected than it is now so certain combinations could be unlikely depending on specific times and locations, there were anti miscegenation laws, etc etc, but. The thing about people is that they have boats and it's notoriously difficult to stop them from having sex with each other. Also the pillaging but I assure you it could be consensual, even
There's this narrative that's like... everyone just stayed where they were from and Europe Used To Be White, Dammit & it's very provably False. Because people have had boats and sex for like thousands and thousands of years. & people will sometimes bring this up to be like "well yeah, the pillaging" and that's absolutely a significant part of it! But people also just... Have Babies Sometimes
Strangest thing is how... historical mixing denialism ??? Will come from white supremacists obviously but the same ideas will be echoed by just anybody. And every so often there'll be some story that's like "Dutch man finds out he's .02% Maori for some reason" "medieval european knew black people existed?" & it's like Yeah dude ... the boat
It's time to plug Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer, which covers the presence of Black people in Roman Britain up to the present. It's hefty, but very readable (and about 25% of the heft is just footnotes and citations)
the world may be a dark place sometimes but there are also 1200 year old paw prints from a happy kitty cat out there
There is so much amazing about this. It's an archeological museum in 530 BCE or so. Also, the exhibits are labeled in three languages. Also they apparently had replicas on display for some things, much like modern museums do.
Humanity has not really changed that much, and some of the ways in which we haven't changed are really good.
Y'all, I am BEGGING you to click through and read that short Wikipedia article. It's the earliest museum we've ever discovered. It was part of the state of Ur.
Some of the artifacts in this museum date as far back as the 20th century BCE, which would have been as long ago to Ennigaldi-Nanna as the fall of the western roman empire is for us
Food history has been so sanitized by the demonization of carbs. “Our ancestors only had fruits and veggies they didn’t have all these refined carbs” our ancestors drank beer 25/8 because the water was bad. Our ancestors drizzled honey on shit ever since we knew it existed. We’ve been making bread for our entire recorded history. It’s true that bleached sugars specifically are a new thing but high glycemic carbs are not new at all, we’ve been consuming them for thousands of years
Quick correction bc I see this myth everywhere.
People drank beer & fruit wine 25/8 because it was high in calories and also tasty and pretty cheap/easy to make in bulk.
The alcohol content in beer/wine back then was too low to actually sanitize anything effectively, and beer/wine only lasts for 6 months (usually less) even while still sealed in a cask, due to oxidization. Oxidation turns fermented liquids into vinegar. Wine and beer wasn’t meant for long-term storage.
This is great, because vinegar is the great preserver! VINEGAR is what people used to store their foods long-term, along with SALT and DRYING and SMOKING.
“Pickling” can be done with pure vinegar if you don’t have any expensive salt around, and vinegar can be made by fermenting any fruit or grain with wild yeast! If you’re lucky, you can also get wine/beer treats out of it on the way.
Circling back around: beer/wine was NEVER a replacement for water. Humans have been drinking from ground springs, wells, rainwater, and clear running water since our ape ancestors got the instinct to avoid stagnant pools.
If you didn’t have immediate access to a source of clean water, you didn’t fucking build a town there!
That’s a big reason why, WORLDWIDE, settlements are ALL historically clustered around sources of water like springs, wells, and rivers. (Or utilized rainwater catchment & storage) And why “the town well is poisoned/dried up!” Is a huge and terrible thing that comes up in a ton of old stories. Losing your source of freshwater means everyone has to move somewhere else, or die.
Even in huge cities, you’d be surprised at how sophisticated freshwater delivery systems were in the middle-ages. London had the “great conduit.” - a man-made, underground channel that moved water directly from a freshwater spring to fill a water tank in the Cheapside marketplace, accessible to the public. This conduit was built in 1245.
Mesopotamians in the BRONZE AGE built clay pipes for sewage removal, and other pipes for rain water collection, and wells. In 4,000 BC.
Building Aqueducts to move spring water into towns was first attributed to the Minoans, who lived in 2,000 BC.
Sanskrit texts from 2,000 BC also detail how to purify water you’re not sure about: expose it to Sunlight, filter it through Charcoal, dip a piece of copper in it at least 7 times, and filter it again. (UV treatment kills bacteria, Charcoal catches many poisons and heavy metal, copper is also antibacterial) <- even if they didn’t know what germs were, prehistoric humans were great at recognizing patterns, and noticing when people DIDNT die.
Persians in 700 BC used ‘qanat’, or tunnels dug into hillsides to let gravity move (CLEAN!) groundwater to nearby towns + for agriculture irrigation. Qanats were still the main water supply for the entire Iranian capitol city until about 1933.
The Roman Empire (312 BC) also built aqueducts to move spring and groundwater across miles and miles.
The Incas (1450) built wondrous examples of hydraulic engineering. Their “stairway of fountains” supplied the entire city of Machu Picchu with fresh spring water from a pair of rain-fed springs atop the mountain. The fountain canals could carry about 80 gallons a minute.
Getting clean drinking water was just not an issue for normal people in MOST long-term settlements. They may not understand germ theory, but they knew clean water was important and would kick up a BIG fuss if those water sources were sabotaged.
In many cultures, there were weak beers. They had names like small beer — they were specifically beers that had low alcohol because people knew that beer got you drunk and if you watered it down or re-brewed using previously used hops or barley or whatever, then you would get a beer that wouldn’t get you drunk.
Same with wines: there was get you drunk wine, and there was wind that you could drink a lot of. They were also cordial made by concentrating fruit juice, or historical drinks like Posca.
As far back is the Babylonian Empire they were making pastries out of dates and pistachios and flour.
Previous to that they probably were as well, but we don’t have any written records of it.
Literally as soon as somebody figured out that you could smash some high fat, high carb, high sugar stuffed together and bake it into something resembling cookies, they absolutely did.
So you should go and eat a cookie, because all of your ancestors spent a lot of time arranging the situation of civilisation to make sure that cookies were available. And if you don’t eat one then they’re going to be very sad
And so will you.
Itechpan Fany ehua Temalacayucan Se tliltic mixtli quitlapachoh Semanahuac San tlatocpah mopatlac cahuitl Quehuac tlapetlanqui: Nochi timomanahuihqueh Tochan Mihqueh miac tocnihuan Ayoc huelqui mihyotiyah. Ome xihuitl topanpanoc hueyi Cocolistli Namah axcanah tlantoc. Cocolistli calactoc Totlacayotipah Tihmachiliah tech tonaltlanticah. Seyoc cahuitl asicoyah ipan Tlaltipactli Yancuic tlahuili tech asiticah.
Augurio 2020
Para Fany de Temalacayucan Una nube negra eclipsó nuestro mundo: en ese instante el tiempo cambió. Como si hubiera relampagueado. Todos nos protegimos en nuestros hogares. Murieron muchos hermanos, ya no pudieron respirar. Durante dos años se apoderó de nosotros la nube negra. La enfermedad pervive en nuestros cuerpos, día con día nos debilita. Otro tiempo ha llegado a nuestro mundo, otra luz ya nos alumbra.
Augury 2020 (VERY loose translation by me, drawing on both the Spanish and Nahuatl, which are both by the original author)
For Fany of Temalacayucan A black cloud eclipsed Our world In that moment time changed. As though struck by lightning We all protected ourselves In our homes. Many of our brothers died, They could no longer breathe. For two years Illness Has not left us. Illness has entered Our bodies Weakening us daily. Another time has come On earth A new light now illuminates us.
Note: the term I've translated as "illness" here is "cocolistli" (also spelled cocoliztli), which is the word that was used historically for the immensely destructive pandemics that ravaged Indigenous Mexican communities in the 16th century. Thus the poet connects the experience of the Covid pandemic to those experienced by his ancestors.
was talking to my mom about how white people ignore the contributions of poc to academia and I found myself saying the words "I bet those idiots think Louis Pasteur was the first to discover germ theory"
which admittedly sounded pretentious as fuck but I'm just so angry that so few people know about the academic advancements during the golden age of Islam.
Islamic doctors were washing their hands and equipment when Europeans were still shoving dirty ass hands into bullet wounds. ancient Indians were describing tiny organisms worsening illness that could travel from person to person before Greece and Rome even started theorizing that some illnesses could be transmitted
also, not related to germ theory, but during the golden age of Islam, they developed an early version of surgery on the cornea. as in the fucking eye. and they were successful
and what have white people contributed exactly?
please go research the golden age of Islamic academia. so many of us wouldn't be alive today if not for their discoveries
people ask sometimes how I can be proud to be Muslim. this is just one of many reasons
some sources to get you started:
but keep in mind, it wasn't just science and medicine! we contributed to literature and philosophy and mathematics and political theory and more!
maybe show us some damn respect
I'd like to give a few examples.
🧪The man known as the father of chemistry (or alchemy, our teacher said both are used for him), Jabir ibn Hayyan. He wrote a book named Kitab al-Kimya, "kimya" means chemistry, and the word chemistry originated from that as well. He invented aqua regia, he had the first chemistry lab, discovered the methods of refining and crystallizing nitric acid, hydrogen chloride and sulfuric acid, and discovered diethyl ether, citric acid, acetic acid and tartaric acid. He developed the "retort" and literally introduced the concept of "base" to chemistry.
📐The father/ founder of algebra, Al-Khwarizmi. He wrote a book called Al-Jabr and the word "algebra" comes from "jabr". He presented the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations. One of his achievements in algebra was his demonstration of how to solve quadratic equations by completing the square, for which he provided geometric justifications. He introduced the methods of "reduction" and "balancing". The word "algorithm" literally comes from his name. He also produced the first table of tangents.
📐Biruni, who proposed that the radius be accepted as a unit in trigonometric functions and added secant, cosecant and cotangent functions to it. He made many contributions to astronomy that are too detailed for me to write here because this is long enough already, but for medicine, he managed to make a woman give birth by C section. He wrote Kitabu's Saydane which describes the benefits of around 3000 plants and how they are used.
🩺The father of early polymeric medicine, Ibn Sina. His books, The Law of Medicine and The Book of Healing were taught as the basic works in medical science in various European universities until the mid-17th century. He discovered that the eye was made up of six sections and that the retina was important for vision, performed cataract surgery. He performed kidney surgery, diagnosed diabetes by analyzing urine, identified tumors, and worked on diseases such as facial paralysis, ulcers, and jaundice. He used "anesthesia" in surgeries, invented instruments such as forceps and scalpels to remove catheters and tumors. He was the first physician in history to mention the existence of microbes, at a time when there was no microscope. He made contributions to so many fields: astronomy, physics, chemistry, psychology (he suggested treating patients with music).
🩺Al-Zahrawi wrote Kitab al-Tasrif, a thirty-volume encyclopedia of medical practices. The surgery chapter of this work became the standard textbook in Europe for the next five hundred years. He pioneered the use of catgut for internal stitches, and his surgical instruments are still used today to treat people. He did so much work in surgery that I can't write them all here. The first clinical description of an operative procedure for hydrocephalus was given by him, he clearly described the evacuation of superficial intracranial fluid in hydrocephalic children. He was also the first physician to identify the hereditary nature of haemophilia and describe an abdominal pregnancy, a subtype of ectopic pregnancy that in those days was a fatal affliction, and was first to discover the root cause of paralysis.
✈️Abbas ibn Firnas devised a means of manufacturing colorless glass, invented various planispheres, made corrective lenses, devised an apparatus consisting of a chain of objects that could be used to simulate the motions of the planets and stars, designed a water clock, and a prototype for a kind of metronome. He also attempted to FLY, and he did fly a respectable distance but forgot to add a tail to his wings and didn't stick the landing.
Women also became scholars in the Islamic society. An example would be Maryam al-Ijliyya, who was an astronomer and an astrolabe maker, who measured the altitude of celestial bodies with the astrolabes she made. Another example would be Fatima al-Fihri, who founded the oldest university in the world, the University of Qarawiyyin.
Baghdad was the dream place anyone in academia now would want to go, it was a peaceful place of inclusivity and research. So many scholars advanced so many fields of study. Ibn al-Haytham invented camera obscura (and pinhole camera), Ibn al-Nafis was the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of blood, father of robotics Ismail al-Jazari invented the elephant clock and his list of contributions to engineering are so long that I can't write them here...
These are just a few examples, of course. I hope this encourages people to do research on this topic more. I even added some emojis to make this more fun to read.💁🏻♀️
Vaccination in the form of inoculation was introduced to the anglosphere and from there into published scientific literature by an enslaved African man named Onesimus in the 1700s.
I wanted to find a source from someone who was a bit politically engaged with the topic, here’s a sort of starter (although they do assume you have heard of Onesimus.)
One small correction: Ibn al-Haytham was not the inventor of the camera obscura, however he was the first to study it and understand the principles that made it work.
more people interested in doing classical reception (eg odyssey posting) should look up "what is prooftexting"
not trying to gatekeep classics here from people having a silly fun time on tumblr. i said people who are interested in the odyssey and that's what i meant, and i'm absolutely including non-academics in this category. i am not a classicist! i've never even been a classics student! i just read (and continue to read) the odyssey for fun.
prooftexting isn't a term that comes from classics, either—in biblical exegesis (bible interpretation), a proof text is a passage the supports an argument for a belief. but prooftexting is the practice of taking an isolated quote as support for a position—extracting it from any context that might not support your agenda. christians are notorious for this (speaking as a practicing christian), even without the vocabulary for it, because once you jettison context and an honest attempt to understand a very, very old and very foreign text, you can make the bible say whatever you want it to.
it's a useful term to be familiar with, i think, because how people (primarily thinking of those in fandom) receive other ancient literature can look very similar. classical reception is (the study of) how "the classics" are received, and encompasses things like "how do people interact in a fandom for a retold myth?" and "how do people post about myths on tumblr?"
a lot of people come by ancient literature secondhand. for example: getting into epic the musical and then being interested in the odyssey. but reading the odyssey in its entirety takes more time and effort than a condensed version; it's not always easy to understand. there's a gap between us and the world of homer, and in trying to cross it, people carry away many different meanings.
this doesn't always jive with a fandomy approach to texts: (many) fans want continuity, authority, accuracy. they want a word of god to back them up. with works from before the concept of intellectual property, without knowable authorial intent, you just don't really get to have that. and what seems less intimidating than trying to read ancient literature? taking your meaning from a snippet or a summary instead, and treating that as the authority. ie, prooftexting.
... and that's basically normal, i think. we can't read all things all the time, and if you're having a fun fandom experience with the epic cycle, who am i to say thee nay? but the result will be, inevitably, further divorced from the source material—and some people having a fun fandom experience do care about that, and want to know more!
anyway, not all prooftexting is equally, idk, disingenuous? if you go hogwild with headcanons about odysseus' sister ctimene, based on the mention of her in one line of the odyssey, it probably doesn't matter. but other times, the departure becomes more blatant, and potentially troubling.
i'll use lies we sing to the sea by sarah underwood as an example, a ya novel that uses melantho, penelope's slave, as a pov character. we know a handful of details about melantho in the odyssey: her father dolius came to ithaca with penelope from sparta; she was raised personally by penelope; she has several brothers; she is sleeping with the suitor eurymachus; she and her brother melanthius are both executed by odysseus and telemachus for siding with the suitors. however, none of the details about her family or history appear in lies we sing to the sea. the author shared that she completed her first draft without reading the odyssey, so i suspect that she simply did not know that we have those details, until after she came up with a different backstory that she preferred. the result is a book in which elements that a reader of the odyssey might consider crucial to melantho's character—her relationship with penelope, her enslavement—are pushed far to the back of its concerns. the melantho of the odyssey isn't really explored, because there's so little interest in the dynamics at play in the odyssey.
and i do think that kind of thing matters. maybe it's not high stakes, but even so, ancient literature is full of serious topics like war and rape and enslavement that ought to be handled with respect. and it's harder to handle them with respect when you lack context. if you pull a paragraph or a name out of context because it helps you argue "this is what's canon"—ignoring that the idea of canon doesn't quite apply to texts like homer—what else are you missing? the text may be saying something else. the text may be saying so much more.
if you lean into your curiosity about what's in ancient literature and what it might mean, beyond supporting your preexisting notions, you're going to have a more rewarding experience as a fan and a reader. that's all.
Pictish drip was insane. Look at this choker:
I think it’s so interesting that we don’t know a whole lot about their culture and beliefs but all of the written reports of them are like “AHHHHH. We’re SCARED SHITLESS of these mysterious painted warriors.” and it wasn’t just the Romans who thought they were terrifying, Pictish pirates were a known problem on the eastern coast of Scotland in the Dark Ages, the Picts were constantly warring with the Britons of Alt Clud and early Irish missionaries write about how converting them was impossible and they kept kidnapping Christians. All we really know about them is that they were artists and extremely tenacious warriors. And they had the sickest drip. Very fascinating.
Oh and other than employing advanced intimidation tactics against their enemies and making unique and beautifully art, they seemed to be culturally indistinguishable from the other Northern European Late Antiquity peoples. They didn’t have any major centers of population and they seemed to be an agrarian people that practiced transhumance. When they weren’t wearing this sickass chain and being terrifyingly efficient pirates, they were probably peacefully farming barley and herding cattle like everyone else. We know of them only as a warrior people because that’s what the rest of the world saw.
just a suggestion but if you're writing about "the ancient world" please don't include societies that existed from like 1300 to 1521
AZTECS AND INCAS WERE NOT ANCIENT I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL
The Americas have genuinely ancient histories also!!!! Tell me why you talk about Rome and Greece and Sumer and the Qin Dynasty and Middle Kingdom Egypt but you've never heard of the Moche or Chavín, the Olmec or the Classical Maya city-states, or even Poverty Point or the Hopewell Interaction Network, or maybe the ancient Tsimshian city of Temlaxam????
okay this is gaining notes so I just want to clarifying:
I'm not saying that the Aztec and Inca societies are not fascinating and super important. They are!!!! Please learn about them!!!! And I'm DEFINITELY not saying this to say they are inferior to Eurasian societies--I want people to learn about the societies BEFORE the Aztecs and Incas.
However, when they are lumped in with the category of "ancient" alongside Rome/Greece/Mesopotamia/Egypt etc societies from before AD 500, it has the effect of flattening Indigenous American history. This is why people are constantly losing their mind over the fact that "Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire" like okay sure. But Teotihuacan is older than Oxford, it's not like there were no societies in the Americas before the year 1300.
Basically no one seems to have a sense of the true length of Indigenous American presence and history in our own continents. That's why this bothers me.
If you don't refer to The Tudors in England as "The ancient Tudors" or The Renaissance as "The Ancient Renaissance" then it's also inaccurate to say "The Ancient Aztecs/Inca". It's really just so common for people to think that Native American history begins and ends with being colonized (thus, why they see a few decades preceding 1492 as being "ancient" for us)
THANK YOU exactlyyyyyyy this
[“Magnificence in clothes was considered a prerogative of the nobles, who should be identifiable by modes of dress forbidden to others. In the effort to establish this principle as law and prevent “outrageous and excessive apparel of divers people against their estate and degree,” sumptuary laws were repeatedly announced, attempting to fix what kinds of clothes people might wear and how much they might spend.
Proclaimed by criers in the county courts and public assemblies, exact gradations of fabric, color, fur trimming, ornaments, and jewels were laid down for every rank and income level. Bourgeois might be forbidden to own a carriage or wear ermine, and peasants to wear any color but black or brown. Florence allowed doctors and magistrates to share the nobles’ privilege of ermine, but ruled out for merchants’ wives multicolored, striped, and checked gowns, brocades, figured velvets, and fabrics embroidered in silver and gold. In France territorial lords and their ladies with incomes of 6,000 livres or more could order four costumes a year; knights and bannerets with incomes of 3,000 could have three a year, one of which had to be for summer. Boys could have only one a year, and no demoiselle who was not the châtelaine of a castle or did not have an income of 2,000 livres could order more than one costume a year. In England, according to a law of 1363, a merchant worth £1,000 was entitled to the same dress and meals as a knight worth £500, and a merchant worth £200 the same as a knight worth £100. Double wealth in this case equaled nobility.
Efforts were also made to regulate how many dishes could be served at meals, what garments and linens could be accumulated for a trousseau, how many minstrels at a wedding party. In the passion for fixing and stabilizing identity, prostitutes were required to wear stripes, or garments turned inside out. Servants who imitated the long pointed shoes and hanging sleeves of their betters were severely disapproved, more because of their pretensions than because their sleeves slopped into the broth when they waited on table and their fur-trimmed hems trailed in the dirt. “There was so much pride amongst the common people,” wrote the English chronicler Henry Knighton, “in vying with one another in dress and ornaments that it was scarce possible to distinguish the poor from the rich, the servant from the master, or a priest from other men.”
Expenditure of money by commoners pained the nobles not least because they saw it benefiting the merchant class rather than themselves. The clergy considered that this expenditure drained money from the Church, and so condemned it on the moral ground that extravagance and luxury were in themselves wicked and harmful to virtue. In general, the sumptuary laws were favored as a means of curbing extravagance and promoting thrift, in the belief that if people could be made to save money, the King could obtain it when necessary. Economic thinking did not embrace the idea of spending spending as a stimulus to the economy.
The sumptuary laws proved unenforceable; the prerogative of adornment, like the drinking of liquor in a later century, defied prohibition. When Florentine city officials pursued women in the streets to examine their gowns, and entered houses to search their wardrobes, their findings were often spectacular: cloth of white marbled silk embroidered with vine leaves and red grapes, a coat with white and red roses on a pale yellow ground, another coat of “blue cloth with white lilies and white and red stars and compasses and white and yellow stripes across it, lined with red striped cloth,” which almost seemed as if the owner were trying to see how far defiance could go.”]
barbara w. tuchman, from a distant mirror: the calamitous 14th century, 1987
(glancing around in mild bemusement)
Seriously, people. Where do you think we even got the word "sponsor" from?
In its original usage it meant a guarantor: someone who promised you that you were going to get something out of what they were doing.
Throwing a ludus / game or a series of games was expensive. Local (or national) Roman politicians put down good money to pay for the rental of the event space (you think the Colosseum was cheap to rent? Think again. The Imperials who built it liked to make their money back...), the wages (and overtime!) of the hundreds of venue support staff, the fees required by the fighting talent and the schools that owned them (or their own management, if they were free), and so forth.
Whoever was footing the bill for a given Game (or sequence of Games) was formally known by the title sponsor, and got to parade around the arena at the beginning of the game to remind people in the stands just who was fulfilling their civic duty by throwing this entertainment for them. The message was, "I'm doing something for you. Next election, don't forget to do something for me!"
And it was always political. Never lose sight of that. (Especially when a local political party promises to build you a nice new stadium if you elect them. The more some things change, the more they stay the same...)
(cc: @petermorwood) 😏
The individual gladiators and charioteers also had sponsorship, in the modern product-placement sense.
Ads were written on blank gable-ends often painted white for the purpose...
...and while the ones in that pic are political slogans, this one is an ad for the wines available at that shop...
...including prices ranging from two to four Asses.
The As was a Roman coin, so you lot at the back can stop giggling.
Other ads were outright endorsements (with appropriate payment, of course) and included stuff like "Felix the Thracian, five-time winner at the Saturnalia Games, says 'Tiburnian Olive Oil Keeps My Sword-Hand Swift!' "
Or "Diocles, Top Driver for the Green Team, uses Scaurus-brand garum at every meal!"
Ridley Scott was told about this during the making of "Gladiator", but ignored it as "unrealistic" - then went on to double the size of the Colosseum "for artistic reasons".
Considering how he's treated historical accuracy in later films, my response to his dismissal of graffiti and ads is this:
I made up Tiburnian olive oil, so it's (probably) fictional, but Scaurus-brand garum was real, and famous enough to appear by name in Pompeii mosaics.
Evidently the name carried weight, just like "Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce".
There are other Worcester sauces, but L & P is THE Worcester sauce - or so they would like you to think - and used to be advertised as "not genuine without this signature".
Whether this was suggesting that all non- L & P Worcester sauces were in some way fake, or because there was a rash of Worcester-style sauces packaged to resemble L & P as closely as possible, I don't know,
However, as regards overly similar packaging (deceptive rather than outright deceitful, relying on accident or inattention more than fakery) take a look at this row of Ancient to Modern L & P...
...compared to another sauce called Henderson's Relish, and note that one label, AFAIK for US sale, refers to it as Worcestershire Sauce.
It's from a different county - Yorkshire not Worcestershire - and is made to a recipe so different it can be marketed as vegan, which real Worcester isn't because of anchovies, so it most emphatically isn't any kind of Worcester sauce at all.
And yet there's that bottle shape, also the label design and colour, so I wonder if, way back when, it was someone's deliberate choice.
The other sauce from Yorkshire is "Yorkshire Relish", made both in the usual thin style and also a thick version like HP Sauce (aka Brown Sauce or Steak Sauce).
Although the label isn't orange, both versions have easy-identification bottle shapes (long-neck cylindrical for thin, short-neck square for thick) characteristic for their contents.
It was apparently like that 2000 years ago, because archaeological finds...
...suggest that the one-handled, high-necked "footed" amphora shown on those mosaics was THE standard shape for garum-jars, thus an instantly recognisable form of product packaging.
Zoom in on each photo, and you'll see writing on the jars. Whether either or both read "Scauri" I can't tell, but if they're from Pompeii I'd make a small wager (maybe even, ahem, bet my As) that Aulus Umbricis Scaurus did indeed put his name - "not genuine without this signature" - on any jars which left his factory.
This one is ours. The shape isn't exact (too short) but pretty familiar...
...but though @dduane and I have racked our brains for what was originally in it (not garum!) we've come up blank. Currently it's full of lemon-infused olive oil, but if we ever buy some modern garum, we'll have somewhere obvious to put it. :->
*****
That short-lived but excellent series "Rome" got it just right. This ad for free wine and cakes is both commercial and political, so covers all bases - and ends with a hint that he gets to read that bloody Guild of Millers bloody slogan Every Bloody Time... :->
It cannot be overstated how much insight A. Umbricius Scaurus' obsession with branding has given us into Roman advertising.
In Pompeii, where he lived and had his factory, there are literally stones and small mosaics IN THE ROAD with his ads on them. The level of dedication the Condiment King of Pompeii put into his advertising, putting it into permanent and quasi-permanent forms, speaks to how much money and effort in Roman society went into advertising. Makes me wonder just how many wooden signs might have been about that were lost in the eruption.
not an uncommon idea to come across but I'm so fascinated by how much about this view of ancient history/culture/myth tradition is unintentionally & straightforwardly revealed by the phrase "and therefore the origin" here -- not just the assumption that these things exist in a strictly linear progression ("greece" exists then "rome" exists) where "greece" and "rome" are the only players (where does pre roman italy fit into this worldview? what room is there here for the influence of ancient north africa and west asia on greece? these places are effectively erased off the map), but the idea of greece as an "origin" of "art and mythology", that in greece it somehow developed whole cloth & completely undiluted by the sort of "cultural borrowing" they perceive the romans are doing. I always find this sort of view of greece as contextless & devoid of movement and trade until it comes time to pass the things they've apparently independently invented on to rome (or have it stolen as some would see it) frustrating, as well as the view of rome as a sort of copy pasted greece with no other influence or separate or preexisting traditions, really frustrating & honestly occasionally kind of sinister tbh
Chalk is squids road.
@siena-sevenwits gave my kids this amazing book that expands on the concept!
