Citizens of Tomorrow, Be Forewarned

What's the first question that really pops into peoples' minds about Ea-Nasir? I'm trying to write this history down, but I'm struggling.

After looking through the evidence, both, but moreso the second.

Ea-Nasir's tablet is dated to 1750 BC, which is coincidentally aligns to the death of Hammurabi. For context, he lived at the end of the Isin-Larsa Period, a time in Babylonia's history where it was a collection of warring city-states. Ur and Larsa were the most powerful of these, since they were farthest south and controlled most of the trade coming up the Persian Gulf. (Isin, near where Hammurabi was from, was in the North and had lost power about 200 years before.)

Right after Hammurabi's death, all the city-states he'd conquered, including Larsa and Ur, decided that they didn't give two squats what the people in the North thought, and started a rebellion.

The tablets in Ea-Nasir's house have been translated. It's very difficult to find them, but the book is called Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period, Leemans 1960, and he makes a series of interpretations that still align with our understanding of the culture today:

Where is Dilmun? Good question! Archaeologists spent the next 40 years figuring it out! At this point, they're fairly certain it's in present-day Qatar. The city was used as a midpoint port to bring in copper from Magan and Meluhha (current-day UAE/Oman and India respectively.)

The reason we know this, is because Oman is an old, old copper-producing region. It's an ophiolite (rock from the seafloor that's been uplifted to the surface) that contained a spreading center (think Mid-Atlantic ridge) which forms deposits of copper and other metals as sulfides from the black smoker vents (copper-iron sulfur, lead sulfur, zinc sulfur, etc.)

To produce copper, you have to remove the iron and the sulfur. To remove the iron, you add "flux", which essentially bonds iron to silica, because it likes silica more than copper does. And to remove the sulfur, you add oxygen, which burns off the sulfur as gaseous SO2.

The copper is heavier than the iron and silica, and sinks to the bottom of the furnace. The iron and silica, slag, flow out the side. The resulting ingot looks like the bowl below. And a lot of times, holes remained from gas getting trapped at the bottom.

They measured copper by weight though, so this wasn't too much of a problem. However, if there weren't enough flux, or the fire wasn't hot enough, iron would also get trapped in the copper ingot, making "black copper"; if a merchant wanted the 97% pure copper that could be made using this process, a lot of iron would definitely be considered 'bad copper'.

Switching back to the culture!

Around 1800 BC, the same time as this was going on, the culture of Oman underwent a noticeable decline. Many of their coastal mines stopped producing copper and people moved inland. They also stopped making bronze with tin. This is notable, because tin was scarce in the Bronze Age and insinuates they might've been left out of the trade route. At the very least, they had stopped being Mesopotamia's primary supplier and started doing their best to keep up with the times.

(At this point, I'll point a finger to Cyprus, which was firing up its smelters at the same time. Cyprus is very interesting, but it pertains less to Ea-Nasir, so I'll just wave enthusiastically at their oxhide ingot copper and tin trade domination.)

So we can't know if Ea-Nasir wasn't a chronic scammer, but I think all the evidence outlines a different story.

Ur, a powerful city-state rebelling against a conqueror within Ea-Nasir's lifetime. Ea-Nasir, selling large amounts of copper to the government, and smaller sales to private merchants who complained about being given scraps; a man who was still traveling to trade copper in a state that had lost their monopoly on the copper trade and was possibly producing some less-than-ideal quality.

He mostly sounds like a person with strong ties to his city and culture. Maybe not the best copper merchant, but certainly a passionate one.

References below the cut:

Show some respect, people.

THANK YOU

The story of Balto is interesting. He led a team of sled dogs across the Alaskan wilderness in the dead of winter with diphtheria antitoxins to stop an outbreak in Nenana Alaska. Diphtheria is a deadly infectious disease that could wipe out a third of a town’s population. It is mostly unknown to the public today because of vaccines. Balto’s body is preserved in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

He’s a big hero of mine!

Let’s not forget Togo! Who, at 12 years old during the serum run, lead his team 200 miles through much more dangerous conditions during the first leg of the journey before Balto ran the last 55-mile stretch.

Togo and Balto didn’t bust their asses for dying children for you to turn around and not vaccinate your damn kids

The actual story is fascinating.

The town of Nome, situated in Western Alaska, was a relative hub for even smaller communities in the region, but in winter was utterly cut off from… nearly everywhere. The harbour iced over in winter, there were no roads connecting it anywhere else, the nearest railroad line was nearly 700 miles (1000+ kilometres) away in Nenana. Air travel was still new at the time and planes couldn’t handle the inclement winter weather.

In 1924, the community had a single doctor and a few nurses who served approximately 10 000 people, including large Eskimo populations in the area (the town itself had a population of roughly 1000 people - bear in mind how few children lived in this community when you see the casualty counts). He had realized his diphtheria vaccine stock was expired and had ordered more from mainland USA months earlier. When it failed to arrive on the final ship of the season, he was a little concerned, but diphtheria was fairly rare, and he figured he’d just restock in the spring.

Of all the rotten luck, January 1925 was when a diphtheria outbreak hit the region.

There was a scramble, in the mainland USA as well as Alaska, to find a way to get the vaccine to this town in the middle of winter. There were attempts to fly a vaccine supply over, but the planes were grounded by storms. This was part of the United States in the 1920s. There was no way to get there.

Except by sled dogs, running the vaccine from that train station in Nenana, 674 miles away. Over 1000 kilometres away, in the dead of winter in Alaska, by 20 mushers (mostly native Athabaskans) and 150 sled dogs running in relay, switching off at tiny villages and rest stations along the way. It was bitterly cold. As in, -85°F (-60°C) at the coldest. There were blizzards, hurricane force winds, and at some points visibility was so poor the men couldn’t see their dogs in front of them.

No man or beast should have been out in that. You freeze in seconds if you’re not moving. Multiple dogs died from being run so hard in such cold weather. Mushers grappled with hypothermia and frostbite. One needed hot water poured over his frozen hands because he was frozen to his sled. Another’s face was black with frostbite. Some strapped themselves up and lead their packs when their lead dogs collapsed.

This relay team traveled 674 miles in 5.5 days. Togo and his owner, Leonhard Seppala, did by far the longest and most dangerous run, travelling over 260 miles (about 420 kilometres) including the initial travel to his pickup spot. Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog, Balto, did the final 53 miles (85 kilometres) into Nome, where they were greeted as heroes.

Prior to the vaccine arriving in Nome, 5-7 children officially died of diphtheria, with dozens of confirmed cases who may well have died without treatment - but it’s suspected the surrounding Indigenous communities were much harder hit, with numbers impossible to confirm.

When you think that this happened less than 100 years ago, how desperate this community was for a vaccine, how much these mushers risked and lost to get it to this town as fast as they possibly could…

I wonder what they’d think of people today.

(this is the Iditarod. this trek to deliver vaccines was so important, that we immortalized it the way we immortalized the marathon.)

American Indian Movement, Wounded Knee, South Dakota,1973

Daily Mirror, England, 13 October 13, 1969

Evening jacket, 1937, by Elsa Schiaparelli

A fine and important Elsa Schiaparelli couture Zodiac jacket, the Astrology Collection, Winter, 1938-39, Paris. This is arguably one of the most beautiful of all Schiaparelli's creations with its glittering embroidery, shimmering star-shaped beads and rhinestones set against a midnight blue velvet background. Marlene Dietrich was photographed in her Beverly Hills residence in 1938 wearing the zodiac ensemble with matching dress. Schiap was fascinated by the night sky that she used to view as a child through her uncle's telescope - the renowned astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, director of the Brera Observatory in Milan. He inspired in her a lifelong fascination with the celestial realm. He commented that the moles on her cheeks reminded him of the Big Dipper which she adopted as her 'lucky star', incorporating it into printed fabrics, the fabric lining her salon, her own personal jewellery as well as on this magnificent jacket. Schiaparelli's press agent Hortense MacDonald stated that the Astrology collection was defined by Euclid's famous geometric treatise - 'Elements'.

I think if you said that to the medieval artist they’d just go, “oh good you understand my vision”.

Like… that’s 100% what they’re going for. Does the tweeter think it looks like that by accident?

I apologize, but I'm taking this as an excuse to infodump just a little. I am excited to tell you a number of things.

First, it is genuinely medieval; that's a pilgrim badge. This particular photo may actually be a replica of the original -- I'm not sure -- but it's a medieval design.

Second, it's definitely supposed to be a vagina. It might also represent Jesus's side wound, but it's primarily a vagina. We know this because the "anthropomorphic vagina" thing is a recurring motif in pilgrim badges and a lot of those badges also have dicks, a context which I think makes the intent clear. (And, of course, there are plenty of badges that are just dicks.)

Third, nobody is exactly sure why this is a thing, but there is some ongoing academic debate on the subject. I've seen arguments for different theories, including:

Fourth, two badges have been found with this design, and it has developed a colloquial name -- here's an excerpt from an M.A. thesis by Lena Mackenzie Gimbel that mentions it. (I was just doing a quick check through the library catalog to make sure I could verify this was a real design, and then I found this source and had to show y'all the screenshot.)

I love the Middle Ages, and so much of it is just objectively friggin' goofy. Also I will be referring to kings as "god's favorite munchkins" in future, thank you.

Reminder that the characters in the Canterbury Tales - some of the raunchiest stories available in any age - are religious pilgrims.

Medieval pilgrims were, at least some of the time, horny as fuck.

I did a work exchange at a museum in the netherlands for a bit when I was 16, and they had a whole cabinet in one of the stable storage rooms just dedicated to drawers and drawers of pilgrim badges shaped like dicks. big dicks, small dicks, fat dicks, skinny dicks, dicks in hats, regal dicks, dicks disguised as birds, dicks disguised as beasts, dicks disguised as pilgrims, ornate dicks, crude dicks. the curator who showed me around was so defeated like "we have no idea what to do with them all. people keep finding them and sending them to us. every time someone digs up a water main they find another dick badge. we have so many already."

Archaeologists still don't know how to solve the riddle of Göbekli Tepe (12000-10000 BC), in Türkiye; that predates Earth's great civilizations by thousands of years.

( simply history has to be rewritten )

The Pazyryk Carpet is the oldest known carpet on earth woven 2500 years ago (5th Century B.C.). It was discovered in the tomb of a Scythian prince in the Pazyryk Valley of Siberia by Ukrainian archaeologist Sergei Rudenko in the late 1940s.

we’ve gone from the yee haw agenda to the ye olde thot programme

Ah yes, those slutty slutty Landsknecht shorts:

The bare-legged / hot-pants look was fairly common, since the whole point about being a Landsknecht (or Reislaufer, their Swiss equivalent) was to look outrageous.

Most period illustrations of Landsknechts are black-and-white woodcuts…

…though in 1905 a book called „Geschichte des Kostüms“ - History of Costume - assembled a bunch of black-and-whites and added colour.

If they look excessively gaudy, they’re not, because these next prints were coloured in-period by an artist called Erhard Schön, and it’s fair to assume he was representing what he saw.

In short - or in shorts - those reenactor costumes are spot on. :->

Something mentioned nowhere in this post that I have just learned from googling: these guys were not Ye Olde Medieval Dandies. They were 15th-16th century mercenaries. Pretty hardcore, too. They were exempt from sumptuary laws (ie the rules that said you couldn’t wear certain colours or cloth or styles) and apparently their response to that was technicolour thotpants.

I was complaining earlier about costuming in both “historical” settings and in fantasy/scifi. This is exactly what I mean when I say a knowledge of actual history would enrich the conceptual creative palette for things like “hardcore mercenary outfits.”

Ok so I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of researching period food & recipes, and,,,,

excuse me medieval people but what the fuck

there is a German cookbook, 14th century, where almost every recipe is titled "eine gute speise" ("a good food"), with notable exceptions such as "das ist auch gute" ("this is also good").

The 1,4000,000-volt X-ray machine at the high voltage laboratory at the National Bureau of Standards, ca, 1940s.

Huh.

original tweet

manuscript

American World War I experimental armor.

On this day, 30 May 1937, the Memorial Day Massacre occurred when Chicago police opened fire on a peaceful march of striking steel workers, their families and supporters. The police murdered 10, shot, beat and hospitalised many others, nine of whom were permanently disabled. One woman participant, Lupe Marshall, testified to a Senate committee about her experiences: “I was aware that my head was bleeding. I noticed that my blouse was all stained with blood, and that sort of brought me to, and I started walking slowly toward the direction from which a policeman had just clubbed an individual, and this individual dragged himself a bit and tried to get up, when the policeman clubbed him again. He did that four times… Then he took him by the foot and turned him over. When the man finally fell so he could not move, the policeman took him by the foot and turned him on his back, and started dragging him. As he turned over, I noticed that the man’s shirt was all blood stained here on the side, so I screamed at the policeman and said, ‘Don’t do that. Can’t you see he is terribly injured?’ And at the moment I said that, somebody struck me from the back again and knocked me down. As I went down somebody kicked me on the side here, a policeman kicked me on the side here.” No police were prosecuted, and the press called it a “red riot”. More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/10317/Memorial-Day-Massacre https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=635216068651612&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

“When she applied to run in the Boston Marathon in 1966 they rejected her saying: “Women are not physiologically able to run a marathon, and we can’t take the liability.” Then exactly 50 years ago today, on the day of the marathon, Bobbi Gibb hid in the bushes and waited for the race to begin. When about half of the runners had gone past she jumped in. She wore her brother’s Bermuda shorts, a pair of boy’s sneakers, a bathing suit, and a sweatshirt. As she took off into the swarm of runners, Gibb started to feel overheated, but she didn’t remove her hoodie. “I knew if they saw me, they were going to try to stop me,” she said. “I even thought I might be arrested.” It didn’t take long for male runners in Gibb’s vicinity to realize that she was not another man. Gibb expected them to shoulder her off the road, or call out to the police. Instead, the other runners told her that if anyone tried to interfere with her race, they would put a stop to it. Finally feeling secure and assured, Gibb took off her sweatshirt. As soon as it became clear that there was a woman running in the marathon, the crowd erupted—not with anger or righteousness, but with pure joy, she recalled. Men cheered. Women cried. By the time she reached Wellesley College, the news of her run had spread, and the female students were waiting for her, jumping and screaming. The governor of Massachusetts met her at the finish line and shook her hand. The first woman to ever run the marathon had finished in the top third.”