per aspera ad astra

I really think Rasputin lucked out, in that being remembered by history as some species of giant unkillable sex wizard is something most of us can only fruitlessly aspire to.

He didn’t luck out, he worked hard for that rep

he really didn’t though

he was just kind of a garden-variety creep, but the rumor mill did all the work for him and now he’s a banger disco song

to be fair, neither could Rasputin. Alexei very much continued to have haemophilia.

isn’t the current theory that he seemed to heal faster and have more spoons when Rasputin was around because Rasputin wouldn’t let the doctors give him aspirin, a blood thinner?

Ra Ra Rasputin Russia’s wellness scamming fiend

Fun fact: the conspirator who’d been made responsible for preparing the poison for Rasputin, Stanislaus de Lazovert, was a medical intern who’d studied under the exact same doctor who kept trying to treat Tsarevich Alexei’s hemophilia with aspirin.

Like, I feel like this should be taken into account when evaluating reports of Rasputin’s miraculous immunity to poison.

Did the guy who shot him also study under that doctor?

No, Felix Yusupov was just a useless nerd who thought he knew how murder worked because he’d read a book.

Based on the available historical evidence, the most likely sequence of events is as follows:

Pretty much everything else about Rasputin’s miraculous invincibility is invented whole cloth, much of it by Yusupov himself in order to build himself up in his own published memoirs.

(As icing on the incompetently poisoned cake, elements of Yusupov’s memoirs were later incorporated into the 1932 film Rasputin and the Empress, which led to Yusupov suing MGM Studios for libel because the film strongly implies that Rasputin was fucking Yusupov’s wife. The precedent set by that lawsuit is the reason those “similarities to any real person living or dead are coincidental” disclaimers exist.)

That last fact took me off at the knees.

Is no one going to mention that all of this (or at least the start of it with the cakes) happened while they were loudly playing “Yankee Doodle” on repeat in the background to try and cover the sound of their murder attempt from the people downstairs.

So, you guys remember good old Ea-Nasir?  The copper merchant from ancient Mesopotamia who kept stiffing his customers out of their money and copper, and then kept their complaint letters stored in a room in his house, to be found by archaeologists thousands of years later?

Well, I recently learned something that makes that story even better.  Most clay tablets from that time period were made of unfired clay, which means that they degraded over time, getting washed away by weather and such.  Some of the fired tablets were fired on purpose, but others were fired accidentally when the building they were stored in were burnt down.  

That means that in this case there are three options.  (1) The tablets in Ea-Nasir’s house were unfired and just really randomly lucky to survive.  (2) Ea-Nasir’s house was burnt down, likely by someone he owed money to.  (3) Ea-Nasir not only kept a bunch of complaint letters in his house, but fired them to preserve them.

The drama of Ea-Nasir is more compelling than pretty much all of the MCU

my money is on Ea-Nasir burning his own house down for Reasons

“Hey, this facial reconstruction of a Roman emperor just looks like some random Italian guy” buddy, I have fantastic news for you about where Rome is.

Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”

Instead all those creatures you know came about from transcription and translation errors from copying Greco-Roman sources (who themselves got them from travelers’ tales from Persia and India - rhino -> unicorn, tiger -> manticore, python -> dragon, and so on).

So unicorns are real

behold… a unicorn

I always thought animals in medieval manuscripts looked like the result of having to draw say. A Tree Kangaroo, but your only source for what it looked like was your friend who heard it from a fellow who knows a man who swears he saw one once, whilst very drunk and lost, and I am SO PLEASED  to find out this is, in fact, the case.

Questing Beast

- Neck of a snake

- body of a leopard

- haunches of a lion

- feet off a hart (deer)

So is it

Or….

don’t forget that some of the legendary creatures they were describing were from other people’s mythos which were passed down in the oral tradition for gods know how long. You know what existed in Eurasia right around the time we were domesticating wolves into dogs?

these beasties. For a long time, science had them down as going extinct 200 thousand years ago, but then we found some bones from 36 thousand years ago. Which, y’know, is quite a difference. Since you can bet that any skeleton we find is not literally the last one of its kind to live, many creatures have date ranges unknowably far outside the evidence.

In South Asia there were cultures that described a man-beast/troll forrest giant  who’s knuckles dragged the ground, and everybody from the west was sure it was superstitious mumbo jumbo, but you know what used to live there?

And did you know that some of the earliest white colonizers of the Americas heard accounts that there were natives still alive who had seen and hunted and eaten a great hairy beast, shaggy like the buffalo but much bigger, with a long thin nose like a snake and two giant fangs… so, like, mammoths, you know? but they were totally discounted because europeans of the time were like, elephants live in Africa and aren’t hairy, you can’t fool us, pranksters!

Anyway, the point is between the early writing game of telephone description thing talked about by OP, and the discounting of native cultural accuracy, I’m pretty sure most legendary creatures are in fact real animals one way or another 

It can’t explain every single legendary creature, but yes, this is super important. Because History relies on written sources, it tends to sweep oral tradition under the rug, even if there’s a lot of interesting informations in it.

And it’s not just living animals that were badly described, or which descriptions got exaggerated over the course of centuries or through translation errors. Sometimes, people finding fossil bones of extinct animals might have also influenced some myths!

By now this is pretty well-known but it has been theorised that the Greek myth of the cyclops was started when people found Deinotherium skulls. Now you might say, uh, how is it possible to think a cousin of the elephant is a huge human dude with one eye?

Well-

- the big nasal opening kinda looks like an eye if you have no idea what kind of animal had this kind of skull (you can read more about this theory in this old National Geographic article if you like).

Here’s a less well-known one; the griffin is a mythological hybrid with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The earliest traces of this myth come from ancient Iranian and ancient Egyptian art, from more than 3000 BC. In Iranian mythology, it’s called شیردال‌ (shirdal, “lion eagle”). Now, it’s been the subject of some debate and it’s not confirmed, but there’s a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as “a lion with an eagle’s head”:

Check the “origin” part of the wikipedia page for “griffin” if you want to find more sources for this theory and for the arguments against it! Again, it’s just a theory, but I think it’s super cool.

This is a pretty well accepted theory for why dragons (or animals we group as like dragons, eg wyverns and drakes) are seen in mythos almost worldwide - because people found dinosaur bones, looked at them, and went “oh fuck what’s that? some big…. lizardy thing?” and then created dragons.

I love how humans have literally not changed throughout history like the graffiti from Pompeii has people from hundreds of years ago writing stuff like “Marcus is gay” “I fucked a girl here” “Julius your mum wishes she was with me” and leonardo da vinci’s assistants drew dicks in their notebooks just for the banter and mozart created a piece called “kiss my ass” so when people wish for ‘today’s generation’ to be like ‘how people used to’ then we’re already there buddy we’ve always been

The Hagia Sophia has inscriptions that were considered sacred for centuries until they were deciphered in the 70s to be Nordic runes saying “Halfdan wrote this”

my old english prof told us that theres a cave in Scandinavia where a viking gratified some runes like 14 feet up on the wall and when they finally reached it all it translated into was “this is very high”

Ancient Shitposting

Now on the History Channel

‘People have literally just always been people’ is genuinely my favorite fact about the world

“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” - Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 BC - 43 BC

Common dog names have literally not changed in 3,000 years.

so not nearly as old but, this is a 12th century stave church in lom, norway (one of less than 40 left in the world)

it’s hard to see, but in the top left corner of this photo where the light comes in from the window, there’s a runic inscription

these photos show it more clearly, it’s easier to see in person. so of course one of the people i was travelling with asked what it said, and we were told it basically translates to:

“on this day, I climbed to this point, in the corner of the church”

people really have always been people

The Chauvet cave, France, the art of prehistory.

In 1994, three friends discovered in the south of France a cave with magnificent cave paintings, more than 30,000 years old.

Under the ground of the Ardèche region, an invaluable treasure is hidden for its antiquity, its conservation and the pictorial quality of the representations; one of the oldest and most splendid examples of Arieñaciense parietal art, dating approx. between 40,000 and 30,000 B.C.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BWfRerMFMCO/?igshid=yqzbqgvny71t

Oof, this gave me such visceral Feelings. Like. Those were people. That was us.

Bless the ancestors

bitch that gesture and line quality...absolutely masterful. people go to $100k art school to learn how to do that and grug was out there in 35000 BC drawing better than seasoned professionals with no reference but memory

This 1000 year old Katana looks as good as it did the day it was made. [3746x3024]

Source: https://reddit.com/r/ArtefactPorn/comments/f72y5g/this_1000_year_old_katana_looks_as_good_as_it_did/

Oh man… This is no longer my lane but I can’t leave this at “1000 year old sword”.

This is Mikazuki. The Crescent Moon blade.

This sword was crafted by Sanj(y)o Munechika and is older than 1000 years. (The Smith’s oldest signed work is from 987).

There are only 5 of the smith’s pieces remaining and this one exhibits one of the first times in history that the Japanese sword takes on it’s utilitarian curved shape.

This sword was owned by a laundry list of important historical figures including Oda Nobunaga’s general Toyotomi Hideyoshi who unified Japan.

You are essentially looking at a Japanese Excalibur.

I am humbled to even be able to see a picture of this sword.

Wonderful 2000 years-old sapphire ring presumably belonged to Roman emperor Caligula, thought depicting his fourth wife Caesonia. [1916x1384]

Source: https://reddit.com/r/ArtefactPorn/comments/fw72av/wonderful_2000_yearsold_sapphire_ring_presumably/

Eartha Kitt speaking truth to power at a 1968 luncheon at the White House hosted by Lady Bird Johnson which resulted in Kitt being blacklisted in the US for nearly a decade.

let it be known that on January 18th, 1968, Eartha Kitt stood in a room full of white women at The Women Doers Luncheon, GOT IN LADYBIRD JOHNSON’S FACE, and told her that the government was sending the best of the youth off to be shot and killed and, in not so many words, that THAT was the reason the youth were rebelling. She ALSO stopped President Johnson after he made a statement claiming that mothers should be responsible for stopping their kids from becoming criminals and asked about “the parents who have to go to work, for instance, who can’t spend time with their children as they should”. It was brushed off by LBJ who only mentioned the funding for day care centers put in place by the recently passed Social Security bill, and then more or less said that the women at that luncheon should figure it out for themselves.

She was blacklisted, but she defended every word she said that day. 

gifs via

SHERO

Respect Mother Sister

y'all better put some respect on her name

I STAN A FUCKING QUEEN

every redpill dudebro who thinks life was better and more “traditional” in the 50s needs to be sentenced to eat 50s food for the rest of their lives

they want a happy housewife but what will happen when she serves them this

Excuse me but what the fresh hell

Do not get me started on 50s food and their obsession with fucked up jello molds and fruit

why were the 50s so weird. it looks like what aliens imagine human food to be. if you told my grandma, who has never even seen cooked meat in her life, “This is what American food is”, she’d believe you and be confused forever by America. 

I wanna say there was some kinda food revolution, like preservatives had just been invented or something, but I’m actually not sure |D it sounds like the sort of thing @pargolettasworld might know about?

As it happens, because I am a dyed-in-the-wool cultural geek … yes, there was some kind of food revolution!  More accurately, several mini-revolutions.

First, you had a lot of commercially prepared products like Jello and Spam (Spam, Spam, Spam …) and things like that being available to the general public for the first time.  A lot of these recipes come from ads for processed foods; they’re “serving suggestions” writ fancy.

Second, the Jello molds in particular are a democratization of an old-fashioned and very upper-class way of preserving perishable foods, which was to encase them in a meat jelly called aspic.  The aspic would preserve the food by preventing bacteria from getting at it.  It took time and effort to make an aspic, so it was rich-people food, prepared by cooks in big houses.  Jello (in its more savory flavors) could do the exact same thing, except that one lone housewife could make a Jello mold cheaply and easily.  I’m not saying that aspic was necessarily the most appealing food out there, but it was high-status because it was associated with Fancy European Aristocrats.

Third, more people had refrigerators, not just iceboxes.  A lot of these dishes need to be chilled, so here’s a way to use one of your fancy new kitchen appliances.

Fourth, this is not everyday food, for which we are all grateful.  It’s Fancy Food, meant to show off.  You’d serve it at a party (and then, presumably, your friends would retaliate by holding another party and serving something else equally revolting).  So this is food that takes careful preparation, lots of time, and lots of effort.  You, as the Middle-Class Fifties Housewife, are showing off your new postwar prosperity.  You have the skill to make food look … um, “attractive,” you have the money to buy all these ingredients, you have the kitchen equipment and appliances to prepare them, and because your husband works a comfortable middle-class job, you have the time to stay at home all day and construct something like this.  This kind of food is the physical manifestation of Thorstein Veblen’s theory of Conspicuous Consumption.

Fifth, if you’re a housewife making this in the 50s and 60s and even into the 70s, there’s a good chance that you were born in the 20s or 30s, and that you grew up during the Depression and WWII.  You might have grown up poor, not having access to a wide variety of food, or not having time or a place to prepare it.  You might have seen fancy food in magazines, but not a chance that that kind of eating would ever trickle down to you!  And then … voila, it did!  I think a lot of this sort of thing is just a grownup way to play with food, to experiment with all the neat new things that technology, processing, and a new tax bracket could bring you.  These are adult mud pies; who cares how it tastes?  We can make it look Really Cool!  We don’t care all that much about specific nutritional value; we’re just so happy to have all this food, and sufficient calories, that we’ll just play with it and try it in weird combinations and enjoy it.  (Or, I suspect, “enjoy” it.)

And just remember … we mock the people who made this stuff, but the 1990s rolled around and brought us Lunchables, and the 2010s brought us molecular gastronomy.  Same shit, different decades.

Reblogging for this very academic explanation…stuff I never would have thought of concerning bananas and jello on top of meat lol.

Thinking of my grandparents, though, this makes total sense. So… TLDR; Savory jello meals in mid-century cookbooks are a result of the rise of the middle class following WWII, reacting to the Great Depression.

And when a six-foot tall Persian priestess with a fucking GOLD EYE speaks, you know you damn well listen to what she has to say.

LOOK WHO HAS SOMETHING DRAW. IT IS ME, MY GAY BITCHES.

Finally had a tiny break time.

So…. Anyone still up for golden eyed six foot tall priestess??

Entire compilation of Roman Emperor facts

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

That fourteen year old emperor was Elagabalus.  You should really say her name, because she was an important figure and fascinating, and historians are very eager to forget her.  I say her because she was openly transgender.  She searched the entire empire for a physician who could give her female genitalia, but as far as we know she couldn’t find one.  She dressed only in women’s clothes and wore makeup and long hair. She referred to herself not as Emperor, but as Empress and as Queen.  She was forced to marry several women for her office but all the marriages ended in divorce.  She freed one of her slaves, a man named Hierocles, and married him.  This made the Praetorian Guard so mad that they decapitated her (and her mother, who tried to save her).

By those standards, Elagabalus was the only female ruler of Rome.

And today she is still only known as “the boy who invented the whoopee cushion.”

This is all fascinating but I’m reblogging for that last comment.

everything you said is true but she wasn’t killed because she freed Hierocles, but because of her religious politic. The thing that romans didn’t like about Elagabalus is the fact that she put herself as a god, because she was the member of a Syrian family that had the priesthood of the deity of the sun (Elagabalus indeed) and she was the great priestess. When she became empress, she sent a portrait of herself to Rome and they had to place it on the altar of victory in the curia and so whenever senators made offerings to the goddess of victory, they had to sacrifice to Elagabalus too. She wanted to combine her god into the whole roman pantheon; she started by associating her god to Jupiter and then she wanted to take all the gods and “put them into” El-Gabal, so in the end the roman religion would have no longer been a polytheistic religion but a monotheistic one. To do so, she then married a vestale, -the priestess of the goddess Vesta-, Aquilia Severa, as a symbol to combine her religion with the roman one (she thought that by marrying a priestess their children would  have been of divine descendance, because he was a priest too, they were both chosen by the gods). But this was an offense to the romans, because the vestale was supposed to stay virgin for her whole life, in fact if a vestale lost her virginity she was buried alive as a punishment. When Elagabalus’ grandma -who was the one who planned to make her empress by saying that she was the illegitimated child of Caracalla- saw that the romans didn’t like her anymore, she wanted to replace her with her cousin, Alexander. Romans liked Alexander more than her and Elagabalus noticed it, so one time she went to the camp of the Praetorian guard with her cousin Alexander and the guard started to acclaim him instead of her and so she accused them of rebellion and then ordered the summary execution of those who supported Alexander and so the Praetorian attacked her and her mother, who tried to protect her, and this is why she got killed, not because she was transgender or because she freed a slave.

Like, guys. Sparta was so kick ASS sometimes when it came to women. Spartan women were given these small knives so that if their husbands came home and tried to hit them or assault them, they had a weapon within reach. That weapon was for CUTTING THEIR HUSBANDS’ FUCKING FACES so that when he went out in public everyone would know he was an asshole, abusing jerkface and they would publicly shame him.

LET’S JUST TALK ABOUT SPARTAN WOMEN FOR A SECOND.

In Sparta, women could own land and were considered citizens. THAT IS A HUGE BIG FUCKING DEAL. Why? Because that was RARE AS FUCK and there are lots of places TODAY where women don’t even get that much.

Divorce was totally fine, and a woman could expect to keep her own wealth and get custody of the kids because paternal lineage wasn’t very important. And it didn’t make her a pariah! She could totally remarry, no big deal at all.

Spartan women participated in some fuckin’ badass sporting events, too. And because they were expected to be as physically fit as the Spartan menfolk (who all had to serve compulsory military duties, btw, and couldn’t marry until they finished them at thirty) they didn’t have time for lots of swishy dresses. So they wore notoriously short skirts. According to some accounts, their thighs were visible at all times. HOLY SHIT. 

Also, In Sparta men only got their names on their graves if they died in battle. And women? Women only got their names on their graves if they died in childbirth. THE SPARTANS COMPARED CHILDBIRTH TO FUCKING BATTLE AND IT WAS VIEWED AS A GODDAMN BADASS AND HONORABLE WAY TO GO OUT.

FUCKING SPARTAN WOMEN. THIS DUDE HAD FUCKIN’ BETTER MAKE SURE SHE’S COOL WITH WHATEVER HE’S DOING, IF HE KNOWS WHAT’S FUCKIN’ GOOD FOR HIM.

^^ I throughly enjoyed the history lesson dashed with the colorful adjectives.

I mean, he knew she was Cersei… lol

And the women were trained the exact same way as men were. As children they were equals ; they were not allowed to wear clothing until a certain age and at that point they were sent away to a training camp until they were 18. It was only the men who were sent into the wilderness for an extra two years to ensure their strength for battle. 

Plus the women could marry whomever they pleased and the men weren’t allowed to live with the women in their house until she said so. And they were tough in Sparta but also all about family. To have male offspring was good luck, to have female offspring was an honour. 

This part of the movie was true; King Leonidas really did kill a man because he insulted his wife and he always ensured that he had his wife’s approval. And while Leonidas was away in battle she did rule Sparta on her own. 

Sparta knew what was up. 

#Hiccstrid

As a historian I can confirm all of this is totally true and amazingly badass.

It’s also worthy of note that people like to romanticize Athens because of its democracy whereas Sparta was a hardened monarchy. But Athens was nowhere near as open for women as Sparta was.

I’m sharing this here for those writers who need a touch of history or inspiration

@deadcatwithaflamethrower

the post, the myth, the legend

The Post, The TRUTH, The Acceptance

Things I learned from studying ancient history:

Don’t forget Konan the Athenian

another pic, different angle

^ important

big boy

michaelangelo could put all that work into perspective tricks and he still couldn’t sculpt a titty

That’s gay culture

It is speculated that the David was in fact inspired by his lover Tommaso dei Cavalieri. If you look closely at the Cappella Sistina and specifically the “Cristo giudice” from “The last judgment” you can see that that Jesus looks like the David (aka Tommaso dei Cavalieri)