@ladykrampus / ladykrampus.tumblr.com
“In the clay, god and man shall be bound; to a unity brought together; so that to the end of days; the Flesh and the Soul; which in a god have ripened – that soul in a blood-kinship be bound.” These are the words etched into clay tablets dating back thousands of years, recording the fascinating Sumerian creation myths that talk of the origin of mankind.
snailstags
‘Hours of Joanna the Mad’, Bruges 1486-1506
BL, Add 18852, fols. 305r and 305v
Giant Pyramid of Captured German Pickelhaube Helmets from WWI Grand Central Terminal, New York, 1918. Photograph by New York Central Railroad.
Details of foliage in the Unicorn Tapestries
Maya culture
Guatemala, 3rd–4th century
9 ¾in high and 7 3/8in wide. (24.8 x 18.7cm)
A favored vessel type of the Maya lowlands was one made in the shape of a tropical bird, perhaps a cormorant, in the act of catching a fish in its beak. The bird’s forehead is marked with a disk, probably depicting a mirror. Details of the bird are rendered on the lid, where its head forms the knob and its wings spread out onto the expanse of the lid. The fish is rendered three-dimensionally, carefully held in the wide bird beak. The bowl beneath the lid forms the body of the bird. In monochrome versions of the theme, as seen here, details are incised; in polychrome examples, they are multicolored. The symbolic meaning of the theme is not clear, even though it remains constant on the lids of a number of different bird-bowl types, from those without feet to four-footed examples. As these bowls have been found in some burials, the theme may relate to death and/or the afterlife, or, more simply, to the presumed contents of the vessel.
From the Metropolitan Museum of Art
I saw this exercise completed in Latin (found here) and decided to try it in Sumerian! Note that some items have multiple vocabulary words; I’ve tried to go with the most basic/most common.*
A — su “body”
1 mush(me) “face” // 2 ka(g) “mouth” // 3 sun “chin” // 4 gu “neck” // 5 murgu “shoulders” // 6-7 a “arm” // 8-9 ashkud “elbow, forearm” // 10 aur “armpit” // 11 shagsud “back (of torso)” // 12 gaba “chest” // 13 endur “navel, umbilical cord” // 14 shag “belly, gut” // 15 kibid “butt” // 16 ib “waist, hip” or sabad “loins, midsection” // 17-18 paphal “leg, thigh” // 19 dub “knee” // 20 ningus “shin”
B — shu “hand”
21 kishibla “wrist” // 23 umbin “nail” // 24-28 shusi “finger” // 29 tibir “palm”
C — sang “head”
30 dilib or siki “hair” // 31 kinamesira “temples” // 32 sangki “forehead” // 34 ngeshtug “ear” // 35 te “cheek” // 36 kiri “nose” // 37 paang “nostril(s)” // 38 meze “jaw” // 39-40 sun “beard” // 41 eme “tongue” // 42 zu “tooth” // 43 nundum “lip”
D — igi “eye”: 44 sigigi or ugurigi “eyebrow”
E — ngiri “foot”
49 zi-in-gi “ankle”** // 50 masila “heel” // 53-55 ngirisi “toe” // 56 umbin “toenail”
F — su “guts, entrails” or ngish “organs”
57 ugu “skull”* // 58 gumur “spine” // 59-61 ngeli or meli “throat, windpipe” // 62 sa “muscle” // 63 mur “lungs” // 64 sha(g) “heart” // 65 ur “liver” // 66 tun “stomach” // 67 shaningin “intestines” // 68-69 sa “vein, artery” // 70 ellang “kidney” // 72 ellamkush “bladder”
*I don’t know of a word for: back of hand; specific fingers, including the thumb; sideburns or mustache; eyelash, eyelid, iris or pupil; arch (ugurngiri?) or ball of foot; brain; pancreas. If you do, please let me know and I’ll update this post!
**I’ve kept the dashes in zi-in-gi to make clear that the “n” and “g” are pronounced separately, as /zin.gi/ rather than /zi.ŋi/. Elsewhere, parentheses indicate the word can be pronounced either way, e.g. ka or kag “mouth”.
A reader, Dan, asks “Why do we forget people’s names when we first meet them? I can remember all kinds of other details about a person but completely forget their name. Even after a lengthy, in-depth conversation. It’s really embarrassing.”
Fortunately the answer involves learning something fundamental about the nature of memory. It also provides a solution that can help you to avoid the embarrassing social situation of having spoken to someone for an hour, only to have forgotten their name.
To know why this happens you have to recognise that our memories aren’t a simple filing system, with separate folders for each kind of information and a really brightly coloured folder labelled “Names”. Rather, our minds are associative. They are built out of patterns of interconnected information. This is why we daydream: you notice that the book you’re reading was printed in Paris, and that Paris is home to the Eiffel Tower, that your cousin Mary visited last summer, and Mary loves pistachio ice-cream. Say, I wonder if she ate a pistachio ice cream while up the Tower? It goes on and on like that, each item connected to every other, not by logic but by coincidence of time, place, how you learnt the information and what it means.
The same associative network means you can guess a question from the answer. Answer: “Eiffel Tower?” Question: “Paris’s most famous landmark.” This makes memory useful, because you can often go as easily from the content to the label as vice versa: “what is in the top drawer?” isn’t a very interesting question, but it becomes so when you want the answer “where are my keys?”.
So memory is built like this on purpose, and now we can see the reason why we forget names. Our memories are amazing, but they respond to how many associations we make with new information, not with how badly we want to remember it.
When you meet someone for the first time you learn their name, but for your memory it is probably an arbitrary piece of information unconnected to anything else you know, and unconnected to all the other things you later learn about them.
The obverse shows the now deified King, Alexander the Great. He is shown in the finest Hellenistic style; facing right, his wild, unruly hair held down by a thin diadem, the horn of Ammon curling over his ear, clearly identifying him as Alexander. The reverse with the goddess Athena enthroned left, holding Nike in her extended right hand, resting her left elbow on a shield with lion headed aegis. The legend reading: BASILEOS LUSIMACOU “Of King Lysimachos.” Crescent and monogram between legend and Athena. Worth $80,000.
Lysimachos (Lysimachus) c. 360 – 281 BC) was a Macedonian officer and diadochus (i.e. “successor”) of Alexander the Great, who became a basileus (“King”) in 306 BC, ruling Thrace, Asia Minor and Macedon.
[ Map of Lampsakos ]
Flintlock long rifle marked “J. Crummey”, 19th century.
Many portraits of Alexander the Great created after his lifetime, like this splendid example, tended to follow the models created by his appointed court sculptor, Lysippos. Features of the grey marble head, such as the slight turn of the head, prominent brow, accentuated and deep set eyes, and long, thick locks of leonine hair, are all hallmarks of Alexander’s image.
What happens when a candle is exposed to flammable gases, and how a safety lamp contains the flame.
A simple gauze casing around a candle, invented by Humphry Davy in 1815, prevented hundreds of explosions in mines, saving thousands of lives in the process. All thanks to a bit of applied science and experimentation.
Thanks, science. Watch the whole story here.
Pazyryk Culture, c. 5th-4th century BC, found in the Fifth Pazyryk mound, Big Ulagan, Pazyryk valley, Gorny Altai, Russia. Made of leather and wood.
The large chariot is one of the most spectacular finds of the Fifth Pazyryk mound. It’s made of birch, and its body consists of three frames with interconnected columns and carved leather straps forming a platform on which stands a gazebo canopy. The huge wheels have 34 spokes which were strengthened by glued birch bark. This chariot was collapsible so it could be carried instead of being pulled when going over treacherous terrain, such as mountains.
The Pazyryk Culture is a Scythian Iron Age archaeological culture (c. 6th to 3rd centuries BC) identified by excavated artifacts and mummified humans found in the Siberian permafrost, in the Altay Mountains, Kazakhstan and nearby Mongolia (map).
Ben Franklin’s Finest — Fart Proudly
In 1781 The Royal Academy of Brussels called forth the scientists of Europe to submit scientific papers for scholarly review. At the time Bejamin Franklin, who was a respected scientist the world over, was Ambassador to France with the mission of drumming up support from King Louis XVI for the American Revolution. After living in Europe for a number of years Franklin came to the opinion that many European academic societies where composed of very rude and pretentious people who were concerned with the impractical. In response to the Academy’s call Franklin submitted a paper called “Fart Proudly”, which was an analysis of the phenomenon of human flatulence. In “Fart Proudly” Franklin described the various sounds and smells of flatulence caused by the digestion of certain foods. Franklin went on further to outline how it is rude and uncivilized to pass gas in the company of others,
“ It is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind. That the permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it. That all well-bred people therefore, to avoid giving such offence, forcibly restrain the efforts of nature to discharge that wind.”
In conclusion Franklin suggests that the scientific community further research the subject of flatulence, with the goal of developing a drug or potion with the effect of rendering flatulence odorless or “as agreeable as perfumes” so that people can fart as they wish without social stigma. Franklin closes by stating that compared to the practical applications of such a discovery, all other fields of research are “scarcely worth a FART-HING.” (a farthing is a coin)
The Royal Academy of Brussels never published his paper, although being a printer Franklin publishes and distributed a number of copies himself. "Fart Proudly" was one of only two banned or censored writings of Benjamin Franklin, the other being “Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress”. To read a copy of “Fart Proudly” click here.
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Dying.
(via patsyjefferson)
please note that george washington was martha washington’s second husband, so her rank potentially went 1) george dying, 2) jefferson in her house, 3) first husband dying.
(via nonnegative)
“I am the Emperor and I want dumplings!”
Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria after being told there were no dumplings.
