Watching some lectures on classical greek art and Kalos inscriptions were mentioned, which I somehow forgot about completely from my art history classes.
It is very nice that a potter would spend hours and hours painting and scratching away at something as beautiful and elaborate as Achilles and Ajax playing dice and then make sure everyone knows that he thinks Onetorides is hot by writing it on the side.
That practice should be brought back.
Except for the potential pederastic aspect. That should not be brought back.
James Frazer wrote: "It was the custom to burn a basket, barrel, or sack full of live cats, which was hung from a tall mast in the midst of the bonfire; sometimes a fox was burned. The people collected the embers and ashes of the fire and took them home, believing that they brought good luck. The French kings often witnessed these spectacles and even lit the bonfire with their own hands. In 1648 Louis XIV, crowned with a wreath of roses and carrying a bunch of roses in his hand, kindled the fire, danced at it and partook of the banquet afterwards in the town hall. But this was the last occasion when a monarch presided at the midsummer bonfire in Paris."
Parisians liked to incinerate cats by the sackful, while the Courimauds (or "cour à miaud" or cat chasers) of Saint Chamond preferred to chase a flaming cat through the streets. In parts of Burgundy and Lorraine they danced around a kind of burning May pole with a cat tied to it. In the Metz region they burned a dozen cats at a time in a basket on top of a bonfire. The ceremony took place with great pomp in Metz itself, until it was abolished in 1765.
The Kattenstoet (lit. "Festival of the Cats") is a parade in Ypres, Belgium, devoted to the cat. It has been held regularly on the second Sunday of May since 1955. Most recently, the 45th edition took place on May 13, 2018 with the next scheduled for 9 May 2021. The parade commemorates an Ypres tradition from the Middle Ages in which cats were thrown from the belfry tower of the Cloth Hall to the town square below.
Now that I think about it I'm surprised that I've never seen anything in Chinese / east asian history about the sort of recreational animal cruelty that's so common in Europe.
I'd assume it did happen and I've just never run across mentions of it, but it'd be interesting to compare.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
The methods for extracting components of traditional remedies were pretty horrific, as were the ways pigs and dogs were cooked alive for festivals, but I've not read of recreational-only cruelty.
Domestic animals were are comparatively bigger opportunity cost in rice-centric farming (more of the yield is fit for human consumption, higher demand for water/space/labor. One of the reasons fish was a more favoured protein source in east Asia) so maybe they were more valuable?
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FandyienBut Otto, what about us? Registered Userregular
When Fandy posts ITT I feel like a 4 your old being shown a particularly complex yo-yo routine.
I’ll be damned if I understand half of what’s going on but I am captivated
aw, shucks, well, I'm really glad people dig my posts and just wanna highlight that one of the things that makes history so much fun is you don't need special skills or knowledge to engage with it, really, it's not like coding or math or biology - there are foundational ideas, sure, and interpretive methods and historiography and stuff but fundamentally history is about telling and understanding human stories, and it's inherently universal in a real, substantial way. everyone can relate to the concrete reality of the past to some degree or another, and it's a tremendous shame that most people think of the whole discipline as just a series of dates and events arranged in a linear way, which is really just the very beginning of learning about the past.
I wish people had more opportunities to engage with the actual interesting stuff instead of the boring apologetics that characterize most textbooks - I had a job working on history textbooks for a bit in 2017 and it was just so discouraging seeing the missed pedagogical opportunities and the degree to which the entire apparatus surrounding textbook production was about cynically extracting wealth from students by minimizing costs - they paid me $15 an hour to write questions, edit chapters, and leech off the state by retrieving royalty-free non-copywritten images from the library of congress that were vaguely relevant to the passages in question, and while I tried as hard as I could, they ended up using the least interesting shit i retrieved.
anyway, I think there are a lot of cool opportunities for historical teaching in the era of web 3.0 or wherever we are, with things like the AC:O historical exploration mode being a good example of the kind of thing I'd love to see but made by scholars and unmediated by the value-form and profit motive, which was what originally brought me back in here to post about, since I think this thread would dig it:
an oregon trail clone made by scholars of Ottoman history where you have to guide a member of the medieval Ottoman world to Mecca safely (and piously) and it includes a lot of actual meaningful information - I was alerted to it by my professor of Ottoman history I took courses with in grad school who I still talk to on Twitter, and it's really impressive! if you're at all interested in learning about the Ottoman empire I'd strongly recommend it to posters ITT
Basically if you want to get an in depth knowledge of a particular place and time in history; find some good books about it, and read them
There are skills which relate to the learning and attempt to gain understanding of history but they mostly are actually like, oh it's apparent once you read a lot of this stuff that there's a lot of inherent gap filling from narratives that exist in our popular conception of history etc etc etc. Once that becomes apparent it sort of just becomes your default assumption and the lens through which you view what you are reading.
These days basically all I read is history and the odd bit of sci-fi tbh.
One thing I find really fascinating about reading history is how terribly relatable the characters are. Big events like wars and inventions are ultimately all products of one or more people feeling a certain way, and occasionally those feelings lead to a major event.
One thing I find really fascinating about reading history is how terribly relatable the characters are. Big events like wars and inventions are ultimately all products of one or more people feeling a certain way, and occasionally those feelings lead to a major event.
this is probably the biggest take away from studying history, is that people have been people like us for centuries. Politics, technology, and religion have changed constantly, but humanity is still fairly predictable and alot of the issues today are struggles that humans have had forever.
One thing I find really fascinating about reading history is how terribly relatable the characters are. Big events like wars and inventions are ultimately all products of one or more people feeling a certain way, and occasionally those feelings lead to a major event.
this is probably the biggest take away from studying history, is that people have been people like us for centuries. Politics, technology, and religion have changed constantly, but humanity is still fairly predictable and alot of the issues today are struggles that humans have had forever.
Mostly agree, except with the whole man-made global environmental destruction that can lead to complete destruction of mammalian life on the planet. I think that is unique to these times. Or at least to the degree to which we're experiencing it and the amount of destruction. And we have scientific ideas on the cause and effects of it, whereas when volcanoes exploded in times past, we blamed it on gods angry at us for unknown and incorrectly perceived sins.
One thing I find really fascinating about reading history is how terribly relatable the characters are. Big events like wars and inventions are ultimately all products of one or more people feeling a certain way, and occasionally those feelings lead to a major event.
this is probably the biggest take away from studying history, is that people have been people like us for centuries. Politics, technology, and religion have changed constantly, but humanity is still fairly predictable and alot of the issues today are struggles that humans have had forever.
Mostly agree, except with the whole man-made global environmental destruction that can lead to complete destruction of mammalian life on the planet. I think that is unique to these times. Or at least to the degree to which we're experiencing it and the amount of destruction. And we have scientific ideas on the cause and effects of it, whereas when volcanoes exploded in times past, we blamed it on gods angry at us for unknown and incorrectly perceived sins.
global crisis of climate change is unique in the scale, also in man made introduction of nuclear weapons and the destruction that can bring, alot of the motivations are relatable or predictable down to an individual level. its true we have the science for it, but our motivations remain rooted in our petty concerns, wealth individual prosperity, politics, and economics.
I think I want to touch on the volcano bit here, because it was a big change of thought when I realised intelligence has been around forever and has existed independently of modern knowledge and science. I'm certain there were many who didn't think it was gods, but thought it was something else, but lacked the resources to really understand. aped from a historical fiction book, a centurion witnessed a meteor streak through the sky, and could only think of where would one build a catapult large enough to throw a rock that high. It really changed my outlook on reading about people from the past, they became actual people who were smart enough and acutely aware of their surroundings, but lacked the tools for actual understanding.
or like santorio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorio_Santorio#:~:text=Study%20of%20metabolism,-Sanctorius%20studied%20the&text=For%20a%20period%20of%20thirty,as%20his%20urine%20and%20feces.
trying to figure out why people eat.
hell these things exist in modern terms as our research into why humans sleep. we know tiredness is bad, and sleep combats that, but the mechanics or the reasoning for it are still under investigation.
I guess I like history for the struggles of people to come up with answers to the world around them even if they are poorly equipped to find the real answers, or they create the tools and achieve some success in understanding. it's very interesting and makes me feel a bit more connected to the people of the past.
One thing I find really fascinating about reading history is how terribly relatable the characters are. Big events like wars and inventions are ultimately all products of one or more people feeling a certain way, and occasionally those feelings lead to a major event.
this is probably the biggest take away from studying history, is that people have been people like us for centuries. Politics, technology, and religion have changed constantly, but humanity is still fairly predictable and alot of the issues today are struggles that humans have had forever.
See, that's just depressing to me. Because it means in all the thousands of years humans didn't change, just their tools and environment, which means we probably won't ever change, which in turn means we will never, ever rise above the base impulses that cause so much suffering in the world. If all we can improve are our tools but not ourselves then I start questioning if humanity going extinct would really be a bad thing overall.
One thing I find really fascinating about reading history is how terribly relatable the characters are. Big events like wars and inventions are ultimately all products of one or more people feeling a certain way, and occasionally those feelings lead to a major event.
this is probably the biggest take away from studying history, is that people have been people like us for centuries. Politics, technology, and religion have changed constantly, but humanity is still fairly predictable and alot of the issues today are struggles that humans have had forever.
See, that's just depressing to me. Because it means in all the thousands of years humans didn't change, just their tools and environment, which means we probably won't ever change, which in turn means we will never, ever rise above the base impulses that cause so much suffering in the world. If all we can improve are our tools but not ourselves then I start questioning if humanity going extinct would really be a bad thing overall.
Perhaps our tools can improve us though? I mean this is a nature versus nurture thing, fundamentally, but some of the tools we invent aren't our swords or guns or whatever, but the systems and structures we create.
Now admittedly, some of these are deadlier weapons than firearms, don't get me wrong. But also some of them might be things that help us to improve - think about education, think about programs which give people opportunities, think about how these things have allowed you to improve yourself, and how greater access to them would potentially improve the lives of countless others.
But developing social safety nets and structures that are designed to make peoples' lives better, by having those available for future generations when they stumble or fall, that's still the tools changing, at the end of the day, isn't it? That's not people's nature changing, that's just becoming better at supporting that nature in positive ways.
Individuals can, I do fully believe that, but I also believe those individuals aren't the ones steering the ship that is humanity as a whole. Those captains are fully immersed into satisfying their every primal urge, integrity of the ship's hull be damned. And there's ultimately only one destination for such a vessel.
I'm not even advocating giving up the fight because what's the use, since we live in the moment so all our fights for a better tomorrow have value. I just look at history and don't see the ship's course changing fast enough to save it in the end.
Madican on
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
I don't actually get it, but a graduate-level scholar of medieval European history has promised me that she snorted coffee out her nose when it came up in her feed.
I don't actually get it, but a graduate-level scholar of medieval European history has promised me that she snorted coffee out her nose when it came up in her feed.
Charlemagne's empire was divided into thirds (Well I think technically fourths but one guy died either before or right after he inherited, can't remember.) The westernmost third was west Francia, which could very roughly be described as "more or less encompassing the lands we now know as France." The easternmost third was East Francia, which again can very roughly be described as "more or less encompassing the lands we now know as Germany and Austria." And then there was the last third, who went to Charlemagne's grandson Lothaire.
The land his branch ended up inheriting ended up including northern Italy, modern day Switzerland, most of the low counties, large swaths of the then wealthiest parts of modernday France and Germany. So you'd think they'd come out on top.
Well, look at this map and consider that the purple, pink and orange parts were all governed under this Lotharingian crown and then consider how the hell you're supposed to either manage or defend all of it. Much more rapidly than the other two kingdoms Lotharingia fractured. It's why people talk about French geography, or German geography, but never Lotharingian geography. (unless you're a huge nerd)
Gundi on
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
lotharingia had no ethnic or linguistic unity, unlike east and west francia
I don't actually get it, but a graduate-level scholar of medieval European history has promised me that she snorted coffee out her nose when it came up in her feed.
Charlemagne's empire was divided into thirds (Well I think technically fourths but one guy died either before or right after he inherited, can't remember.) The westernmost third was west Francia, which could very roughly be described as "more or less encompassing the lands we now know as France." The easternmost third was East Francia, which again can very roughly be described as "more or less encompassing the lands we now know as Germany and Austria." And then there was the last third, who went to Charlemagne's grandson Lothaire.
The land his branch ended up inheriting ended up including northern Italy, modern day Switzerland, most of the low counties, large swaths of the then wealthiest parts of modernday France and Germany. So you'd think they'd come out on top.
Well, look at this map and consider that the purple, pink and orange parts were all governed under this Lotharingian crown and then consider how the hell you're supposed to either manage or defend all of it. Much more rapidly than the other two kingdoms Lotharingia fractured. It's why people talk about French geography, or German geography, but never Lotharingian geography. (unless you're a huge nerd)
Proto-Scotsman sneaking in an early model bagpipe for an impromptu rendition of Scotland the Brave, circa 9th century BC
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
edited February 2021
Crossposted from D&D
In modern Russia, there is a city called Veliky Novgorod, which basically translates to "Newtown the Great." It's actually quite old, over a millennium (though the exact founding is unknown), though it did have a pretty great history, for instance being a republic from the 12th through 15th centuries, a prosperous trade port at the eastern end of the Hanseatic League, and being a precursor state to Russia.
Onfim seems to have been around six or seven years old, and he was learning to write. Birch bark was cheap and plentiful enough it could be used for children too, so scraps include him writing the Cyrillic alphabet and copying Psalms as practice. But he was also a little boy, so there are plenty of little drawings too.
Some things definitely don't change. Kids get bored in class and they start doodling.
I assumed Zweihanders were meant to like murder horses but apparently they were anti spear weapons which makes them seem even sillier. Yes let's just make a sword as long as a spear to beat spears as opposed to just, y'know, using a slightly longer spear.
I assumed Zweihanders were meant to like murder horses but apparently they were anti spear weapons which makes them seem even sillier. Yes let's just make a sword as long as a spear to beat spears as opposed to just, y'know, using a slightly longer spear.
but then they've countered you with their own slightly longer spear.
I assumed Zweihanders were meant to like murder horses but apparently they were anti spear weapons which makes them seem even sillier. Yes let's just make a sword as long as a spear to beat spears as opposed to just, y'know, using a slightly longer spear.
but then they've countered you with their own slightly longer spear.
Fine. Then they'll just invent the gun.
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Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
I assumed Zweihanders were meant to like murder horses but apparently they were anti spear weapons which makes them seem even sillier. Yes let's just make a sword as long as a spear to beat spears as opposed to just, y'know, using a slightly longer spear.
You only need a couple zweihanders to get within spear busting range to disrupt a spear wall, and a disrupted spear wall is basically dead meat walking in a battle.
Conversely, two units of roughly the same amount of speardudes can poke at each other for basically ever.
Posts
I’ll be damned if I understand half of what’s going on but I am captivated
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
It is very nice that a potter would spend hours and hours painting and scratching away at something as beautiful and elaborate as Achilles and Ajax playing dice and then make sure everyone knows that he thinks Onetorides is hot by writing it on the side.
That practice should be brought back.
Except for the potential pederastic aspect. That should not be brought back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat-burning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kattenstoet That one seems like a fun tourist festival.
I'd assume it did happen and I've just never run across mentions of it, but it'd be interesting to compare.
Domestic animals were are comparatively bigger opportunity cost in rice-centric farming (more of the yield is fit for human consumption, higher demand for water/space/labor. One of the reasons fish was a more favoured protein source in east Asia) so maybe they were more valuable?
aw, shucks, well, I'm really glad people dig my posts and just wanna highlight that one of the things that makes history so much fun is you don't need special skills or knowledge to engage with it, really, it's not like coding or math or biology - there are foundational ideas, sure, and interpretive methods and historiography and stuff but fundamentally history is about telling and understanding human stories, and it's inherently universal in a real, substantial way. everyone can relate to the concrete reality of the past to some degree or another, and it's a tremendous shame that most people think of the whole discipline as just a series of dates and events arranged in a linear way, which is really just the very beginning of learning about the past.
I wish people had more opportunities to engage with the actual interesting stuff instead of the boring apologetics that characterize most textbooks - I had a job working on history textbooks for a bit in 2017 and it was just so discouraging seeing the missed pedagogical opportunities and the degree to which the entire apparatus surrounding textbook production was about cynically extracting wealth from students by minimizing costs - they paid me $15 an hour to write questions, edit chapters, and leech off the state by retrieving royalty-free non-copywritten images from the library of congress that were vaguely relevant to the passages in question, and while I tried as hard as I could, they ended up using the least interesting shit i retrieved.
anyway, I think there are a lot of cool opportunities for historical teaching in the era of web 3.0 or wherever we are, with things like the AC:O historical exploration mode being a good example of the kind of thing I'd love to see but made by scholars and unmediated by the value-form and profit motive, which was what originally brought me back in here to post about, since I think this thread would dig it:
http://www.hajjtrail.com/
an oregon trail clone made by scholars of Ottoman history where you have to guide a member of the medieval Ottoman world to Mecca safely (and piously) and it includes a lot of actual meaningful information - I was alerted to it by my professor of Ottoman history I took courses with in grad school who I still talk to on Twitter, and it's really impressive! if you're at all interested in learning about the Ottoman empire I'd strongly recommend it to posters ITT
Edit: quick, somebody do one of the Silk Road, immediately.
There are skills which relate to the learning and attempt to gain understanding of history but they mostly are actually like, oh it's apparent once you read a lot of this stuff that there's a lot of inherent gap filling from narratives that exist in our popular conception of history etc etc etc. Once that becomes apparent it sort of just becomes your default assumption and the lens through which you view what you are reading.
These days basically all I read is history and the odd bit of sci-fi tbh.
this is probably the biggest take away from studying history, is that people have been people like us for centuries. Politics, technology, and religion have changed constantly, but humanity is still fairly predictable and alot of the issues today are struggles that humans have had forever.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/BretonBrawler
Mostly agree, except with the whole man-made global environmental destruction that can lead to complete destruction of mammalian life on the planet. I think that is unique to these times. Or at least to the degree to which we're experiencing it and the amount of destruction. And we have scientific ideas on the cause and effects of it, whereas when volcanoes exploded in times past, we blamed it on gods angry at us for unknown and incorrectly perceived sins.
global crisis of climate change is unique in the scale, also in man made introduction of nuclear weapons and the destruction that can bring, alot of the motivations are relatable or predictable down to an individual level. its true we have the science for it, but our motivations remain rooted in our petty concerns, wealth individual prosperity, politics, and economics.
I think I want to touch on the volcano bit here, because it was a big change of thought when I realised intelligence has been around forever and has existed independently of modern knowledge and science. I'm certain there were many who didn't think it was gods, but thought it was something else, but lacked the resources to really understand. aped from a historical fiction book, a centurion witnessed a meteor streak through the sky, and could only think of where would one build a catapult large enough to throw a rock that high. It really changed my outlook on reading about people from the past, they became actual people who were smart enough and acutely aware of their surroundings, but lacked the tools for actual understanding.
or like santorio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorio_Santorio#:~:text=Study%20of%20metabolism,-Sanctorius%20studied%20the&text=For%20a%20period%20of%20thirty,as%20his%20urine%20and%20feces.
trying to figure out why people eat.
hell these things exist in modern terms as our research into why humans sleep. we know tiredness is bad, and sleep combats that, but the mechanics or the reasoning for it are still under investigation.
I guess I like history for the struggles of people to come up with answers to the world around them even if they are poorly equipped to find the real answers, or they create the tools and achieve some success in understanding. it's very interesting and makes me feel a bit more connected to the people of the past.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/BretonBrawler
See, that's just depressing to me. Because it means in all the thousands of years humans didn't change, just their tools and environment, which means we probably won't ever change, which in turn means we will never, ever rise above the base impulses that cause so much suffering in the world. If all we can improve are our tools but not ourselves then I start questioning if humanity going extinct would really be a bad thing overall.
And we can make a world that allows us to be pretty wonderful, I think
Perhaps our tools can improve us though? I mean this is a nature versus nurture thing, fundamentally, but some of the tools we invent aren't our swords or guns or whatever, but the systems and structures we create.
Now admittedly, some of these are deadlier weapons than firearms, don't get me wrong. But also some of them might be things that help us to improve - think about education, think about programs which give people opportunities, think about how these things have allowed you to improve yourself, and how greater access to them would potentially improve the lives of countless others.
But developing social safety nets and structures that are designed to make peoples' lives better, by having those available for future generations when they stumble or fall, that's still the tools changing, at the end of the day, isn't it? That's not people's nature changing, that's just becoming better at supporting that nature in positive ways.
I'm not even advocating giving up the fight because what's the use, since we live in the moment so all our fights for a better tomorrow have value. I just look at history and don't see the ship's course changing fast enough to save it in the end.
I don't actually get it, but a graduate-level scholar of medieval European history has promised me that she snorted coffee out her nose when it came up in her feed.
The land his branch ended up inheriting ended up including northern Italy, modern day Switzerland, most of the low counties, large swaths of the then wealthiest parts of modernday France and Germany. So you'd think they'd come out on top.
Well, look at this map and consider that the purple, pink and orange parts were all governed under this Lotharingian crown and then consider how the hell you're supposed to either manage or defend all of it. Much more rapidly than the other two kingdoms Lotharingia fractured. It's why people talk about French geography, or German geography, but never Lotharingian geography. (unless you're a huge nerd)
Gavelkind (CK2) / partition (CK3) is a bitch.
In modern Russia, there is a city called Veliky Novgorod, which basically translates to "Newtown the Great." It's actually quite old, over a millennium (though the exact founding is unknown), though it did have a pretty great history, for instance being a republic from the 12th through 15th centuries, a prosperous trade port at the eastern end of the Hanseatic League, and being a precursor state to Russia.
It was a place where learning could thrive, so literacy seems extremely widespread for the time. The city was surrounded by birch forests, so a lot of writing was made on readily available birch bark. The soil there also happens to be great for preserving items that would normally quickly rot away, so this isn't all just supposition: archaeologists have found hundreds of birch bark notes from Novgorod, centuries old. This includes a set written by a little boy named Onfim.
Onfim seems to have been around six or seven years old, and he was learning to write. Birch bark was cheap and plentiful enough it could be used for children too, so scraps include him writing the Cyrillic alphabet and copying Psalms as practice. But he was also a little boy, so there are plenty of little drawings too.
Some things definitely don't change. Kids get bored in class and they start doodling.
Guy was large assumedly
Eh, cool С wouldn't really look as good
Ivan the Terrible
but then they've countered you with their own slightly longer spear.
Fine. Then they'll just invent the gun.
You only need a couple zweihanders to get within spear busting range to disrupt a spear wall, and a disrupted spear wall is basically dead meat walking in a battle.
Conversely, two units of roughly the same amount of speardudes can poke at each other for basically ever.