in mesopotamia there were no 'cover letters' or 'curriculum vitaes'. there were just, pots.
And copper ingots. Very high quality ingots from a very reputable merchant
Y’know, that’s a really good point. Are we sure we want to be giving the worst businessman in known history more power in the afterlife?!
Yes, because when Trump dies and thinks he’s going to be king shit in the afterlife, ea-nasir is going to one-shot him with a shitty copper ingot upside his empty orange fucking head
Each Reblog adds another copper ingot to ea-nasir's afterlife pile. Each like improves his aim.
Ea-nasir's ingots were not ingots like we think of them but something closer to oxhide ingots.
Voting for Ea-nasir to beat the shit out of Trump with big metal slabs
went to miami to recover father sotirios. and made some new friends.
these animals... they are wise. I recruited them to avenge my dear brother. I was then escorted out of the sea world.
Better than the 1596 Marseille dolphin exorcism I suppose.
In 1596 dolphins were infesting the port of Marseille. Back in those days, y’see, dolphins didn’t have the cuddly image they enjoy today. They were pests and were causing damage.
So the cardinal of Avignon sent the bishop of Cavaillon to do something about them. In front of a huge crowd, the bishop sprinkled some holy water into the waters of the port and told the dolphins to begone. Whereupon the dolphins indeed turned tail in terror and fled, and were never seen again.
Still not as dramatic as Saint Bernard excommunicating the flies though.
What happened to the flies?
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux built a monastery in 1124, but it was plagued by flies. So the good saint promptly excommunicated them. By the next day the flied had died in such quantities that they had to be shoveled out.
Still not as nutty as the Basel rooster trial though.
*everyone in unison* um what rooster trial?
In 1474, a rooster in Basel did the heinous and unspeakable act of laying an egg. As everyone knows, an egg laid by a rooster will hatch into a basilisk (or cockatrice).
So to avoid the creation of a cockatrice (or basilisk), the rooster was tried, found guilty, and burned at the stake along with its egg. A huge crowd was present.
The “rooster” in this case was likely a hen that had developed male characteristics (it happens).
Still not as properly legal as the Savigny pig trial though.
Ok, clearly you want an excuse to talk about the pig thing, and I now DESPERATELY want to hear about the pig thing, so PLEASE tell us about the Pig Thing.
In 1457 a sow killed Jehan Martin, a five-year-old boy in Savigny. For that crime she was put on trial and judged guilty, and sentenced to be hanged from a tree.
Her piglets, however, were judged to have been innocent of the murder, and so were returned to the owner, with the caveat that he had to surrender them to the law if they were later found to have eaten any of the boy.
Not to be confused with a whole bunch of other, similar porcine trials.
I won’t mention the 1454 excommunication of eels in Lake Geneva then.
OK what did the eels do, and more pressingly why were they in communion with the church in the first place
Animals are expected to be part of the Church by default, that’s why they take excommunication so badly.
Felix Hemmerlin’s treatise on exorcism, cited by e.g. Wagner’s Historia Naturalis Helvetiae (1680), informs us that around 1221-1229, eels once infested Lake Geneva in huge numbers. So Saint William, bishop of Lausanne, excommunicated them and banned them from the lake, forcing them to live in only one part of it.
Plot twist: as far as we know, Saint William was never bishop of Lausanne.
There’s no way you have historical Christianity nonsense more silly than this to share
I’ve been trying to stay on brand and talk about animals only, but sure, few intersections of Christianity and the legal system get sillier than…
… the Cadaver Synod.
Pope Formosus (“Good-looking”) was pope from 891 to 896, and apparently accumulated a few enemies. After his successor Boniface VI enjoyed all of a 15-day papacy, the next pope elected was Stephen VI.
And he hated Formosus.
How much? He had the corpse of Formosus exhumed, dressed up in papal vestments, and put on trial for his failings as a pope.
End result? Formosus was found guilty of papal fail. The corpse was stripped of its clothes, three fingers on its right hand were severed (no blessings for u), and it was tied to weights and dumped in the Tiber.
Needless to say Stephen VI came to a sticky end. An angry mob deposed him, he was strangled in prison, and Formosus’s corpse was fished up and reburied with honors. And the later popes passed edicts ensuring this kind of silliness would not happen again.
Tune in next time when I tell you about how a lawyer defended a city’s entire rat population.
Please, the rats, give us the rats, i beg....
The story of the rats of Autun is also the story of Barthelémy de Chasseneuz (or Chassenée, etc.), a highly original and highly talented defense lawyer. That’s him here.
When the town of Autun was infested by rats in the early 1500s, they were accused of eating the province’s barley crop and were duly summoned to be judged in an ecclesiastical court of law. Chasseneuz was the defense attorney.
How do you defend an entire swarm of rats? You don’t, is the answer. You delay. Chasseneuz’s original defense was “my clients live all over the place, one summons won’t be enough”. So he got a court summons to be posted in all the infested parishes.
When the rats didn’t show up after the elapsed time delay, Chasseneuz proceeded to explain at length why. The rats didn’t come to court, he said, because of their enemies the cats, which are everywhere and always vigilant and hungry. “You cannot expect my clients to undertake a journey which would put them in mortal danger”, he argued in complete seriousness. “Thus they have the legal right to turn down a summons that endangers them”.
As far as we know, the rats never did appear in court, and remained unprosecuted.
Chasseneuz went on to have a distinguished career as a lawyer and was allegedly killed by a poisoned bouquet of flowers.
Anyone else picturing @a-book-of-creatures sitting in a tavern, significantly tapping their glass every time someone begs for a story, noting that telling stories sure is thirsty work...
“In 1404, King Taejong fell from his horse during a hunting expedition. Embarrassed, looking to his left and right, he commanded, “Do not let the historian find out about this.” To his disappointment, the historian accompanying the hunting party included these words in the annals, in addition to a description of the king’s fall.“
LMFAOOOOOO rip to that guy
i thought maybe this was fake, but there’s even a citation!
Taejong Sillok Book 7. 5th year of King Taejong’s Reign (1404), February 8.
Happy 618th anniversary of the day King Taejong fell from his horse!
Apparently the recorders were really intense about this. We have a record of King Taejong complaining about a recorder who followed him on a hunt in disguise and another who eavesdropped on him behind a screen. No one was allowed to see the records, even the king (one king did and killed five men based on what was written there, after which they took greater care to ensure it would never happen again), and changing the content or disclosing it was a capital punishment. Even when there were rival political factions trying to influence the writers, they wrote down what was a revision and what wasn’t and kept an original version with no revisions in it.
They also made sure to back up their data. They made four copies of it, then when three copies were lost in the Imrim Wars they decided to make five more copies just in case. One copy was destroyed in a rebellion, another was partially damaged in an invasion, and Japan stole one copy during their occupation and moved it to Tokyo University, where it was mostly destroyed in the Kanto Earthquake (47 books remained and were returned to South Korea in 2006). Now the whole thing is digitized, free on the internet, and translated into modern Korean for all to see.
It took centuries of meticulous recorders, justifiably paranoid copiers, absolutely determined historians, and painstaking infrastructure for this joke to be possible. Happy 618th anniversary to the day King Taejong fell from his horse.
Happy 619th anniversary to the day King Taejong fell from his horse!
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:
- some kind of apotropaic function
- medieval hookup culture
- funy
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."
Thank goodness I can now reblog a version of this which points out that yes it is indeed 100% a vagina
Reminds me of when I tried to find one of these on tumblr once
Literally 1984. Medieval pilgrims were raunchier than us 😔
Oh hey! One of my friends is a medievalist and has written papers about these, she has infodumped to me about them a bazillion times.
Her theory is that these may have been satirical items -- that, essentially, what these badges are saying is 'look how silly these women being out on their own are, isn't it ridiculous to see women traveling alone, they might as well just be wandering vaginas.' The dicks carrying around the vulva is a further statement of ridiculousness, basically.
The idea of 'hysteria' literally being 'wandering wombs' means it's sort of a ... visual pun? 'Look at these hysterical women just wandering around like their loose wombs.'
Dunno if it's true or not, because we really don't know for sure, but that's her theory!
If you have @jstor access, there's a review of her book which talks about this here:
I suspect that non-medievalists probably aren't aware of a) the VAST profusion of penises, vaginas, and other genital/phallic symbols in medieval art (especially religious art) and b) the fact that yes, all of these things are put together with intense layers of symbolism about Christ's wounds, the (sexual) mystic experience of the divine, and the general Gender Fuckery that goes on in even a cursory examination of medieval popular mysticism, including that performed by prominent female and even nonbinary or transgender (as we would call them) individuals. This is not to posit a la John Boswell that the medieval Catholic church was an explicit vehicle for social acceptance of gay/queer people, but it does mean that queerness, gender, religion, femininity, and masculinity were all intertwined and represented in any number of ways in devotional art, including (as evidenced above) in pilgrim badges given to believers who had made the physical journey to holy sites such as Santiago de Compostela and Jerusalem, and that queerness and religion were NOT mutually exclusive in the medieval world. Indeed, medieval religion offered certain avenues and experiences by which to conceptualize, imagine, enact, or glorify queerness in ways that were less licit elsewhere, and shows yet again the uselessness of the Medieval Catholic Church Always Bad Mind Control Humorless Murder Blah Blah Blah stereotype. Yes, they did do a lot of murder, but there was also this.
The fact that the Pussy Goes A-Ridin' vagina pilgrim badge looks like Jesus's side wound (as noted in the first set of tag above) is not coincidental in the least; there is a vast corpus of scholarship dedicated to studying, shall we say, the yonic resonances in this imagery and what it was intended to imply about the gender or gender experience of the medieval viewer in relation to Christ and Christ himself. There are too many examples of scholarship about this for me to cite here, but I'm happy to dig up more if anyone's interested in Yes Jesus's Wound Looks Like a Pussy, It's Intentional and Please Do Read Into It. Likewise, it wasn't just that this mystic devotion to the queerly gendered body of Jesus criss-crossed masculinity and femininity, but sometimes transcended them altogether. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, an award-winning scholarly collection that came out a few years ago, examines all of this in more detail, but there's also a chapter entitled "Gender-Querying Christ's Wounds: A Non-Binary Interpretation of Christ's Body in Late Medieval Imagery" that puts some of these discussions into context and explains how the wounds of Christ, especially that suspiciously vagina-looking side wound, played into a rich visual history and intertextuality of feminine, queer, non-binary, and proto-trans theologies and experiences.
So yes: the imagery does exist on purpose, it's real, it ties into a many-layered discourse about gender, sexuality, queerness, religion, physicality, and femininity, and those interpretations are not just modern conceits but exactly what the original medieval artists were in fact going for, and what they would expect to be understood.
also if you wanna combat the "women in the past only crossdressed because of misogyny!" you have GOTTA read chapter 11 in Transgender Warriors where leslie feinberg does such a good job constructing an argument against this kind of radfem reductionism
""No wonder you've passed as a man! This is such an anti-woman society," a lesbian friend told me. To her, females passing as males are simply trying to escape women's oppression- period. She believes that once true equality is achieved in society, humankind will be genderless. I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't predict human behavior in the distant future. But I know what she's thinking- if we can build a more just society, people like me will cease to exist. She assumes that I am simply a product of oppression. Gee, thanks so much."
"First, let's talk about who can pass as another sex. My same friend reminds me periodically that she too might have passed as a men a century ago to escape women's oppression. She stares right past my gender expression as she speaks. [...] I don't want to burst her bubble. Everyone deserves untrammeled dreams. But I want to tell her that, in the dead of winter, if she was bundled up against the cold, with a hood or hat covering her head, some man in a deli might call her "sir." But could she pass as male on a board ship, sleeping with and sharing common facilities with her fellow sailors for decades and not be discovered? Of course, hundreds of thousands of women have dreamed of escaping the economic and social inequities of their lives, but how many could live as a man for a decade or a lifetime? While a woman could throw on men's clothing and pass as a man for safety on dark roadways, could she pass as a man at an inn where men slept together in the same beds? Could she maintain her identity in daylight? Pass the scrutiny of co-workers? Would she really feel safer and more free? How could females have lived and been accepted as men without hormones or surgery? They must have been masculine; they must have been trans-gendered. If they were not, how could they pass? We don't know how each of the thousands who passed from female to male over the centuries would define themselves today- whether as transgender or transsexual or drag or any other modern definition. The point is that their gender expression allowed them to transition. I just don't believe that the debate about why "women pass as men" can be understood only in the light of women's, or of lesbian and gay, oppression. It has to be viewed in the context of trans history in order to make sense."
"Look at George Sand, the nineteenth-century novelist. It's true that she could not have published without a male nom de plume at that time. But if that's all there was to her identity, why did she wear men's clothing? Why was she attacked for masculine behavior? And if it was just a question of lesbian oppression, what was she doing in bed with Chopin? If passing from female to male is simply motivated by the need to escape lesbian oppression, then why have females who have passed as males chosen other men as lovers?"
"Finally, if so many females have passed as men only to escape women's oppression, then why have so many males passed as women? While it is biologically easier for a female to pass as a young boy than for a male to pass as a woman, there are many, many examples in the modern era of those who passed from male to female."
"We have not always been forced to pass, to go underground, in order to work and live. We have a right to live openly and proudly. When we are denied those rights, we are the ones who suffer that oppression. But when our lives are suppressed, everyone is denied an understanding of the rich diversity of sex and gender expression and experience that exist in human society. I have lived as a man because I could not survive openly as a transgendered person. Yes, I am oppressed in this society, but I am not merely product of oppression. That is a phrase that renders all our trans identities meaningless. Passing means having to hide your identity in fear, in order to live. Being forced to pass is a recent historical development. It is passing that is a product of oppression."
See the chap with glasses and an incredible moustache in the bottom right? that's Magnus Hirschfeld, the gay Jewish doctor who ran the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in Berlin. It was largely his books, his research that the Nazis burned.
Everyone else in this photo is a trans person that Dr Hirschfeld worked with. This photo was taken at their christmas party.
It is important to note that this action was not an "oh, Nazis ALSO targetted other prople". They directly linked Hirschfeld's institute and research to claims of a Jewish plot to destroy German society.
If that sounds familiar, it's because it is the EXACT same rhetoric being rolled out by prominent TERFs for the last few years including, yes, The Wizard Lady.
Antisemitism, racism, and transphobia/homophobia are ALWAYS linked together.
shit man this got me emotional
left: the Nebra sky disc, circa 1600 BCE, showing the Moon, Sun, and stars in gold on copper - the oldest depiction of the cosmos in the world
right: the Webb Space Telescope, July 2022, revealing thousands of baby galaxies forming in the early days of the universe - humankind’s deepest look into the sky
The thing is, I have nothing against socialism or communism as a political ideology; trust me, I'm as anti-capitalist as they come. The leftism is really not the problem here.
The problem is when in their leftism, people – Americans, really, and western Europeans – use the ussr as this sort of goal, this complete antithesis to the modern capitalist society, this almost-utopian place to live. They use hammer and sickle symbol, the ussr anthem; sometimes, as a joke, sometimes, not so much.
Not only that clearly shows that they know absolutely nothing about the ussr – it's also spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not, which is especially insidious now, when russia is literally committing a genocide.
The ussr wasn't a socialist utopia where everyone is equal. It was a totalitarian dictatorship, responsible for colonisation and genocide of multiple people and cultures. Just like the russian Empire before it. Just like modern russia continues to do now.
For many Eastern European and Central Asian people, hammer and sickle is not just a symbol of a political ideology. It's the symbol, under which people were starved to death, imprisoned or executed for daring to write in their own language; in which cultures were erased, people – forcefully assimilated, stripped of their own national identity.
It's the propaganda of being "the same people, the same nation" that russians love to use; that westerners love to believe, for the sole reason of the oppressed daring to look similar to the oppressor; for the sole reason of Americans being unable to look past their own history and realize oppression comes in many shapes and forms.
By using the ussr symbols in your political movement, you're denying the atrocities commited under that symbol and spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not.
It's not "progressive" to wave around a hate symbol.
Do your research.
To the people in replies equating the hammer & sickle to the reclamation of 'queer':
No.
The word queer was created by queer people, and though it was appropriated as a slur for a while, it has been reclaimed as a self identifier for generations. The only people we hurt by calling ourselves by name is, perhaps, ourselves. Even if the term had originated as a slur, it would have been targetting queer people as victims, meaning we are the people to listen to about its reclamation.
US and W Euro communists did not create the hammer and sickle. It was not used to symbolize genocide against W Europeans and US Americans.
It is a military symbol of an empire that attempted, even occasionally succeeded at, genocide. The survivors of those attempts are the people harmed by its use.
We have no business 'reclaiming' the hammer and sickle; they aren't ours. The victims of USSR genocide alone determine who gets to reclaim it.
The rest of us would do well to defer to them, just like so many people deferred about the swastika after it was used as a symbol of genocide, too.
For a full century, use of the symbol was voluntarily deferred by Buddhists, Navajo, and other groups that used it. It is only being slowly re-adopted as the direct survivors of that genocide die of old age.
Meanwhile, the most recent USSR genocides were occurring during my own childhood and I'm a fucking millennial.
The only people who get to have an opinion about 'reclaiming' this symbol are the survivors of the genocides it represents.
We already have a simple, easy to use symbol for labour rights and equality that came out of our own history as W Euro and American communists. And it wasn't even used to justify mass murder!!
Shut the fuck up, put on your big kid panties, and use Bread and Roses. 🥖 🌹
Hi, Eastern European leftist here to cosign this.
The USSR was a brutal, genocidal, totalitarian dictatorship. The rest of the Eastern Bloc was no better. In the last century, the second most common cause of death in my family (after Nazis) was "torture and murder by the communist government".
I have family members whose NAMES I don't even know, because the government thoroughly unpersoned them. (This is not a TikTok euphemism, btw. It's from Orwell's 1984.) Many of my family members were still terrified of speaking out against the government, even twenty years after the communist regime fell, even in private.
I don't even know what to talk about, really, to get people to see my point. The multiple genocides that the Soviet Union did, in an attempt to leave only the good Russians? The way that Jewish and Muslim communities were targeted far, far more than Christian ones? The mass surveillance and propaganda campaigns that left the populace a nervous and confused wreck? The KGB?
I mean, I get it. Y'all grew up in the West, all you've known your whole life is the crushing boot of Christianity and capitalism. You learned the word "propaganda" and you learned how the west lied and subverted and waged war and you decided that if the west was bad then the governments they opposed, such as the USSR, must be good, and that all the horror stories are propaganda.
They're not. The reality of Eastern European communism, as told to me by my family and by my country's historians, is WORSE than whatever you learned in history class.
And you, Western leftists, are not the inheritors of that trauma, and you don't get to claim it's symbols.
Stop using the hammer and sickle. Stop calling people "comrade". Stop talking about the glory of the Soviet Union. And for fuck's sake STOP PLASTERING IMAGES OF LENIN AND STALIN EVERYWHERE, my god, why the fuck is this even a thing I need to say.
I'm a western leftie but I'm just gonna pipe in for a few seconds. I grew up in a right wing household but to this day, the one piece of good political information my father ever imparted upon me is that politics/political ideology is not a straight line, it is a circle. By that I mean, you go too far in either direction and you wind up looking the same.
Excuse the crude drawing but you get the idea.
Much like with everything, listen to the people that are/have been actually effected by the issue at hand. We know to listen to black people when it comes to anti-black racism and its prevalence in modern society. We know to listen to women on what it's like to be a woman in todays society. We know to listen to trans people on trans issues. We know to listen to Jewish people when it comes to antisemitism. Why do we not listen to those who have experienced radical communism under the ussr when it comes to left leaning ideology?
The world is not split into good and bad. Everything is shades of grey. Yes America has an issue with anti-commie propaganda and yall have been raised that literally any sort of socialism is evil and must die a fiery death, but like, just cause capitalism is fucking awful, doesn't mean the opposite wasn't just as fucking terrible too.
It’s scabbing and so it itches A LOT and I’m struggling a lot to not touch it... but it’s beautiful and perfect and everything I wanted.
Disclaimer: if you say a single word about ancient curses, I will rip your head off for your very Christian and Eurocentric approach toward ancient non-Western cultures. If you want to know more about my tattoo, the woman who had it close to two millennia before me, or my own reasons for the tattoo, I’m happy to answer those questions. If you tell me I’m cursed because you think everything ancient holds some magical and malevolent power, I will actually destroy you.
Dermatologists hate her! Achieve the complexion of a 1500 year old mummy with this one weird trick!
To everyone who’s asked about the tattoo specifically ( @goreoboros @midnight-blue-moon-princess @spartan127 @pagaea and probably some other people I’ve missed).
The tattoo is drawn from the Pazyryk Ice Maiden, an unintentional mummy that accidentally led to an absurd amount of knowledge about Scythian culture. I have a whole tag about her which should give you the basics - essentially, she was a priestess of some kind, she was disabled at a young age, she died of bone cancer. I intended to get my tattoo years earlier, but it doesn’t escape me that the tattoo was a present to myself on my 33rd birthday, which is probably the oldest the person who originally bore it was when she died.
If you can love a person across time, I love her. I love her humanity, the story we can infer from her bones - and, as I’m studying forensic anthropology, the story inferred from bones is particularly important to me. As a disabled person, her existence, and the fact that she was loved enough to bury her the way they would warriors, when there was no way this woman ever went to war... it’s important to me. We have always cared for one another. Disabled people have always been of great importance within their culture. And she and her grave have become our greatest evidence of what Scythian culture was actually like - this woman disabled from a fairly young age, dead of cancer young as well... she was loved and cared for and so important in that society that they built a burial mound for her that (unintentionally) stood the test of time better than any other.
...I got her tattoo not only because I love ancient art (I’m literally planning an entire sleeve of ancient art on my other arm), but because to me she’s a symbol of humanity. That humans are meant to care for each other, that even in ancient times, disabled people were able to be important and beloved in their community. That the worst right wing assholes are wrong about human nature, because I have proof from antiquity that our nature is to love and care for each other.
This woman survived a decade past when she should have, after that first fall that disabled her. This woman lived and became an important person in her culture. This woman had shoes where even the soles were beaded because they would never need to touch the ground. This woman was cared for, and loved, and revered, and she’d been disabled since she was a young teen. This is all important. This all matters.
Researchers have used Easter Island Moai replicas to show how they might have been “walked” to where they are displayed.
Finally. People need to realize aliens aren’t the answer for everything (when they use it to erase poc civilizations and how smart they were)
(via TumbleOn)
What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”
Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it
And the Iroquois told Europeans that squirels showed them how to tap maple syrup and no one believed them until they caught it on video
Oral history from various First Nations tribes in the Pacific Northwest contained stories about a massive earthquake/tsunami hitting the coast, but no one listened to them until scientists discovered physical evidence of quakes from the Cascadia fault line.
Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.
Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/
Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄
Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year.
“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.
In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.
“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”
“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”
Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.
“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”
Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.
Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.
oh man let me tell you about Indigenous Australian myths - the framework they use (with multi-generational checking that’s unique on the planet, meaning there’s no drifting or mutation of the story, seriously they are hardcore about maintaining integrity) means that we literally have multiple first-hand accounts of life and the ecosystem before the end of the last ice age
it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.
Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians. So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least
Ain’t it amazing what white people consider history and what they don’t?
I always said disservice is done to oral traditions and myth when you take them literally. Ancient people were not stupid.
Why don't girls like history? No no, I mean like, watching YouTube videos about the Wehrmacht, not actually studying history, that's stupid and is for girls.
So in the Egyptology group chat this morning, we were having a discussion on Amenhotep II’s ‘mesh underwear’ that he’s depicted wearing under a sheer top cloth. They’re made of Gazelle leather, and each hole is hand cut with a modesty panel for butthole and structure. This led to some back and forth about examples, like this one:
Soldiers are depicted wearing them too:
And then we came across one with much larger holes cut in the leather:
Which led to a discussion about Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep II being balls out in flexible leather fishnet style underwear….
Sweaty balls? In this pre-capitalist market economy?
pin-up was of course immediately suggested
The clap of his ass cheeks keeps alerting the Hittites…
That’s amazing. How did they do that?? And how did it stay intact for so long that we have actual examples to work from??
a) Egypt’s climate is very good at keeping these things intact because it’s so dry. Organics simply do not rot away as fast or as much.
b) We had a discussion on this, and it’s making lots of cuts, alternating from each other, and then just cutting out the bits in the middle. Like this:
Still very complicated, and since these are single pieces of leather, they can’t make a mistake either.
You wouldn’t even need to cut away parts from the middle tbf, if you make these cuts close enough to each other and then stretch the leather to the side, it should afaik make the diamond pattern. I do have a large piece of leather here to potentially try it, but not the right tools so I owe you guys that bit of experimental archaeology.
You can see it in the closeup of one of the loin cloths Lottie posted, just to the right underneath the accession number:
Those are alternating cuts set very close together.
Also as we were chatting about it, we figured it may be entirely possible for the Egyptians to have had some sort of die cutter or mold to make this process easier. But as none of us have been aware of this leather loin cloth type before this morning, we’ve not been able to do the research to say for certain if we’ve found a tool like that yet!
made me think of this thing that i have at home
did they use tools like that or was it all made by hand? I know nothing about ancient egypt. I just wonder if it wouldn’t be too tedious to do smth like that by hand ‘just for some underwear’ but then again i am a total layman in this, never even had any interest in ancient egypt so i’ve got no clue about the value of these items at the time, nor do i have any other info on ancient egyptian leatherwork or clothes in general. But i can imagine a tool like this being just really neat.
They most likely made all the incisions by hand using a sharp implement like a knife made from copper or bone. There’s another example from the Hierokonpolis C-Group tombs of Nubians who arrived in Egypt during the First Intermediate Period (the part between the Old and Middle Kingdoms):
This one is done by small rectangles all 4mm apart, which were slashed in probably by a small knife. The loincloth above is a very early extant example of this type of leatherwork that didn’t really take off until the New Kingdom, but we know they imported this sort of leatherwork technique from both the Nubians and the Asiatic civilisations they came into contact with. This one in particular belonged to a Nubian woman who was a dancer in her younger days, so would wear this….and basically nothing else….to dance in. Here’s a New Kingdom example of a dancer wearing a similar mesh loincloth:
If you want to read more about Leatherwork in Ancient Egypt, you can read this 2008 article by André J. Veldmeijer on the subject, and if you want to know more about the Nubian Dancer/her loincloth/her tattoos, you can read this article on Hierokonpolis Online, which is run by the team who excavates the site.
Please reblog this version if you’re looking for ‘how was this done?’ because tumblr hid it in the notes due to the fact I provided external linked sources to more info.
I’d like to add, with the caveat that I’m not a professional, that having worked leather the given explanation for how these garments are made seems completely plausible to me. I’m tempted to try a bit of experimental archaeology but frankly I don’t have the time to re-create all the relevant elements.
Let me go into a bit more detail and some speculation as to How I Would Do It.
Now, I have never dealt with oil-cured gazelle skin. Oil-curing is virtually unknown in modern times, as it is inferior to modern tanning in pretty much every way - though I bet it’s very kind to the skin, which is would be desirable for such a garment. And gazelle skin is… well, it wouldn’t be impossible to get, but it’s not something a North American leatherworker handles very often. I’d like to mention here that oil-cured gazelle skin is - as the linked paper above mentions, technically not leather, but I will be referring to it as such hereafter for simplicity and as the closest modern analogue.
My immediate guess was that the leather used would be something like deerskin - soft, stretchy, not very strong. But on a bit more thought I think that’s not the case at all. To get a garment as depicted, I think the material would be rather more like goatskin: thin, strong, moderately soft, not very stretchy. Gloving leather, in modern terms. That’s what I’d try first, at any rate.
Now, it’s obscure to me as to why they chose this kind of leather for their undergarments when they clearly had access to cotton and linen, materials that other cultures preferred for such uses. I can guess that it might have been due to economy - leather could have been cheaper than woven cloth; it may have been a perceived or real matter of hygiene, or durability. It could have simply been a cultural preference: bear in mind that the pre-Pharonic people of the region were once referred to as Penistaschen Leute (penis-sheath people) based on the Eastern Desert petroglyphs from that period, and they may have retained a cultural preference to protect their genitals with animal skins even after woven cloth became available.
Whatever the reason, at some point they transitioned from the pre-Pahronic loincloths to a more structured, closer-fitting garment and doubtless ran into the inherent flaws with using leather: that it does not breath, and it does not stretch enough for such a high movement part of the body. Potentially we can see transitional artifacts or depictions which would shed light on how this garment evolved.
Now, from a leathering perspective both issues can be solved in the same way: with cutouts. My personal suspicion is that the cutouts were initially for ventilation as larger cutouts (or, potentially, starting with a loose loincloth and adding ties to keep it from moving so freely). Over time they adopted much smaller but more numerous cutouts which enabled a closer-fitting garment which nonetheless was comfortable and did not restrict freedom of movement. Again, speculatively transitional artifacts or depictions might exist - but it’s entirely possible that the leap from “loincloth” to “leather fishnet” was accomplished by a single artisan and then rapidly popularized.
As to the construction of the garment, I wholly agree that there was no need for a specialized tool. Ancient Egyptian smiths were entirely capable of making a full set of leathering tools, most of which would be familiar today. I am sure I’ve seen copper head knives much as are still in use (granted modern examples are steel). This versatile tool would serve quite well for making exactly the kind of cuts we see in these garments. An Ancient Egyptian leatherer, then, likely just reached for their most familiar tool.
Now if I were to make one of these garments, there are two other tools I’d need: a straight-edge and a cutting board. A more skilled leatherer might be able to make the cuts freehand, but a skilled leather would also recognize the merits of not doing things the hard way for no reason. If my speculative method is correct, I suspect we would find a straight tool, likely with a number of evenly-spaced marks, as a guide for making the holes. As for the cutting board, this should be reasonably obvious, that making even cuts requires a solid surface but one soft enough to not ruin the cutting blade. If a cutting board had been used for this purpose, I’d expect to find lines of nicks in the board. However, cutting boards are necessarily consumable resources - they will be disposed of after they are no longer usable. Also, given the relative scarcity of wood in Ancient Egypt they may have used other, more degradable materials for their cutting boards.
I think specialized tools are unlikely. Such tools might make sense for a larger scale mass production operation: we can envision a factory which made nothing but undergarments. However, to my knowledge in Ancient Egypt most finished goods of this nature were made locally and custom-ordered. There was not an Ancient Egyptian “Fruit of the Loom”; one simply went to the local leatherer and paid them to make a garment. On that scale, specialized tools would actually slow down the process for a number of reasons, and I doubt any leatherworker would feel the need to get a custom tool for something they could easily do by hand.
Now, at this point I feel I should emphasize again that I am not a professional Egyptologist, and much of what I have said is speculative. While I have made a few predictions which would either prove or disprove my speculation, I have not checked to see if that evidence exists. Should a professional feel that this post is misinforming regarding Ancient Egypt I will delete it.
No, this is a really good response! The only thing I can add, from an Egyptological perspective, is that they did have linen loincloths it’s just that linen, depending on quality, was expensive and time consuming to make. This meant that leatherwork was quicker and easier, especially on a mass production scale needed for something like the Egyptian army. Linen was also seen as ‘sunday best’ so was reserved for special occasions, though this probably didn’t extend to underwear. Kha and Merrit’s tomb has numerous linen loin cloths, and so does the tomb of Tutankhamun. I think these leatherwork loincloths were used in conjunction with the linen ones, so the linen would be underneath the leather, but I’ve no idea what the reason for this is really. Amenhotep II was drawn in just the fishnet loincloth for a bit of fun, but you can see the images of the soldiers above seem to have white underneath the leather. However, this could equally be because the paint for the leather and skin colour is essentially the same, so they left it white for a sharper contrast (something they do a lot).
So, most of this is covered already in the post and cited links, but here goes:
- Structure. So it doesn’t split apart when you sit down.
- New Kingdom
- The post tells you that it was worn over the top of linen loincloths and that simply wearing it as just mesh is a joke. It would have been to keep the linen loincloth in place.
- Yes and no. It’s fashionable for the New Kingdom, but as you can see, Soldiers are wearing it, thus it is also practical.
- See answer 3.
- You’re thinking of modern leather work. Egyptian leather work is not the same, as it does not involve tanning or tawing. After a skin was flayed, underlying fat and hair were removed by rubbing urine, ash, or a mixture of flour and salt into the haired surface. Next, the skin was cured, arresting the degenerative process. They were then cured in oil for 2-3 days. After which, they can be quickly made. They don’t just use gazelle, but sheep/cows/goats leather too. There would have been one guy whose only job was to go and hunt gazelle if it was required for finer leather. Failing that he would use the hides of animals that had been butchered for meat. Likely the buildings were next door to one another. This information I’ve retrieved from the article on leather working I linked to. Linen on the other hand comes in various grades and each strand has to be made by hand from flax, before being woven into bolts of cloth. The process is extremely intensive, and would have had to start from planting seeds to grow the flax for making it, waiting 100 days for growth, rippling and retting (removing of seeds/coarse fibres), drying it, scutching it (removing the linen fibre from the unwanted plant fibre), and then hackling (getting the fibres into long strands). Only then can you begin the process of weaving it into a cloth. The finer the linen, the longer the process. So we’re talking about several weeks of work for linen, but maybe a week or so for leather.
- Ancient people did not have the constraints on their time as we do now. The time it takes to make something would have been faster due to the skill of the craftspeople. They don’t have to clock in and out. There’s no deadline to make as many garments as possible. They go into work and make as many as they make that day and the order is fulfilled when they’re done. You’d get a rough estimate from the craftsperson of ‘oh it’ll be done in 12 days’ and you’d just come back and collect it then.
I hope that clears up the confusion you were having!
I cannot fucking believe how much I'm losing my mind right now over soy sauce history. I'll tell all of you about it after I finish this essay because I need to un-distract myself enough to finish it but what the fuck? What the fuck is going on? I'm losing my fucking mind.
During World War 2 there was a push to industrialize the Japanese soy sauce industry to be better for mass-production. This innovated the chemical fermentation technique and the semichemical fermentation technique utilized by Kikkoman; rather than ferment for four years in gigantic cedar barrels, kioke, instead fermentation takes place for six months or a year in stainless steel barrels which utilize electrolysis to artificially speed up fermentation processes.
During Postwar occupation by Americans, Japan was experiencing massive shortages for the raw materials needed to make soy sauce nationwide, and was forced to rely on exported materials from America to make production. A single American woman named "Ms Appleton" was given total control of apportioning all American soy bean rations to companies, how much, and to who. She had no knowledge of soy sauce, allegedly.
She apparently had so much power over Japanese soy sauce production that she could singlehandedly shape its future by threatening to not give soy beans to any company, family, or factory which did not utilize her specific requirements of semichemical fermentation (reduced from chemical fermentation, since it was that abhorrent). These days, the term soy sauce is distinct from traditional shoyu, and requires distinguishment because of such a radical difference the two products are.
Here's the problem, folks:
I can find absolutely no evidence that Ms Appleton ever existed. There are no sources about this specific period in Japanese history that I'm able to definitively confirm. All of the sources which reference Ms Appleton are referencing in circles with each other; there is no listed source for any of them. Kikkoman's official English website is a veritable goldmine of information regarding this piece of history, with an entire 4 size 13 paragraphs. It not only gives me a first name, Blanche, but also tells me she worked for General Headquarters and that her policies and decisions shaped governmental policies heading into the future.
Except any variation of searching for Ms Appleton, Ms Blanche Appleton, and so on gives me absolutely no information about her ever existing. By appending keywords such as Ms Blanche Appleton+soy sauce, or Ms Blanche Appleton+GHQ, we can find the same couple of sources that are circling each other--or, in the case of the latter, only Kikkoman.
But there is NOTHING else. I'm getting pageantry from some minnesotan town; I'm getting world war 2 veteran records and obituaries when trying to follow that route; I'm getting k-12 teachers and a Titanic survivor named Charlotte. There is no fucking evidence of a Blanche Appleton to substantiate these claims.
And this is fucking massive. Because there should be way more information on her if this was the case; she was apparently powerful and influential enough during the occupation that she could singlehandedly enforce whatever arbitrary rules she wanted on the soy sauce industry and they had to comply or else have no product at all. That level of power is fucking insane. Imagine having so much raw influence over Japan that you could order them to completely renovate and change how they produce and make SOY SAUCE, literally one of if not THE most important thing in Japanese culinary history--and yet there's absolutely zero reference to this outside of like, three specific sites, and none of them have sources, or if they do, they source those sites.
What the fuck is happening here? There shouldn't be radio silence about this woman. There should be records of her policies, there should be legal documents in America which record how she apportioned out American exportation of soy beans to Japan, there should be sources talking about this woman's ability to transform Japan's soy sauce production so heavily that today only 1% of all soy sauce is made with pre-WW2 traditional techniques.
So if she's that big a deal then why does she not exist?
I feel like I'm losing it. I can't think about this too hard because it gives me a headache trying to comprehend any possible answer. There is so many levels to how this shouldn't be happening that I can't settle on just one. I don't understand how some foreigner American could have an iron fist over soy beans so hard that she could apparently influence national policy heading into 2022 but I can only find a first name on the Kikkoman website.
I literally just sent in a Freedom of Information Act request to the national archives asking for any records of a Ms Blanche Appleton, her reports, census information, anything. I can't believe that I'm having to use FOIA to try and ask the government to prove a woman existed because she was that big of a deal in SCAP/GHQ.
This is a translated page of Kikkoman's .co.jp website, with an apparent picture of Ms Appleton.
But this says that she has an apparent good knowledge of soy sauce brewing--directly contradictory to the Kikkoman.com claim that she had "no experience". And it also claims she was in charge of GHQ, which I'm going to assume is a mistranslation, but still.
Major General Murcutt doesn't exist. Douglas MacArthur was appointed head of GHQ/SCAP during the occupation of Japan. This now just has more questions. How did this woman become so important to GHQ that she could directly speak with a Major General? Any level of power or public view she SHOULD have isn't here. You don't just get to be colleagues of a Major Damn General in Post World War 2 Japan. That isn't given to any random housewife.
I just emailed a shoyu brewer family, Yamaroku, about this. The Yamaroku brewery was established 400 years ago; if the company/family were affected during the 1950 import rations and under the thumb of the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers, they'd have records and memory of Blanche Appleton or what it was like during that period as a brewery.
I am at the point where I am genuinely considering the possibility of Blanche Appleton never having existed. There is the chance that Kikkoman invented an 'ambassador'-type person with high influence in the General Headquarters during the occupation to grant itself apparent influence/validity/power above the rest of the competition. "The woman who controls all soy materials coming into Japan visited our main factory and said she liked us :)".
It's incredibly fitting that my first act of serious investigative journalism is about soy sauce. Like, I'm a little annoyed at how on brand this is for me. Of course I'm overly invested in this weird little nitpick about soy sauce. Of course I'm making this the government's problem.
Of course.
It's currently 12:14AM. I have just learned that a private individual submitted a research query to the Japanese National Diet Library in 2008 regarding any information or proof of Blanche Appleton in relation to soy sauce production.
This information was told to me by a follower of mine--who asked to be anonymous. So right now we have evidence that Japan as an entity cannot find evidence of Blanche Appleton ever existing within relation to soy sauce production. And I can't find evidence of Blanche Appleton existing in obituary records, nor any publicly available birth/deaths.
Right now there seems to be more and more evidence that Miss Blanche Appleton was a complete invention of the Kikkoman Company possibly dating back nearly a hundred years. But why?
If nothing comes back from my Freedom of Information Act request, I'm going to be contacting Kikkoman directly. I'm not going to just let this slide. People have been noticing this since at least 2008. Who is Miss Blanche Appleton? Why would she be faked by Kikkoman? What's the point of this lie, and if it's the truth, if she was real, why can't I find any proof of that?
Who is Blanche Appleton?
Why is everything starting to point towards yakuza/organized crime Kikkoman origin story and why am I researching zaibatsu breakups of the GHQ and where assets from various clans got sent to.
I'm kil'd by several accidents
“Cancer, and Wolf”
'Suddenly'