Aspiring Equal Oppertunity Feminist Granola girl.

Coins weren’t the only, or the most important, place that Indian and Greek cultures impacted one another. Take a look at this 1885 photo of a piece of an ancient column found in what’s now northern Pakistan:

If you know your Greek columns, you’ll be able to identify this as the Corinthian style (Corinthian capitals are the really complicated ones with lots of leaves). But who’s that in the middle?

Yep, it’s the Buddha, plunked down in the middle of a very Greek-looking piece of sculpture.

And look what’s on top of it — a bunch of very distinctively stylized Indian elephants:

{WHF} {Ko-Fi} {Medium}

Yep, we've known about Gandhara style since aeons ago. Glad that the West is "discovering" this afresh

An amateur detectorist has discovered Viking bounty in a Danish cornfield, including a rare coin trove & silver jewelry, revealing global Viking trade & raiding.

A ‘unique’ Thor’s hammer has been unearthed in a dig in Sweden, thought to have been worn for protection during the Viking resistance to Christianization.

Viking Bronze Amulets, c. 800-1000 AD,

Found in Ukraine, it consists of charms, amulets and pendants traditionally work by female Vikings.

Women in Ancient Egypt

Wow, an ancient Greek piggy bank. Never expected the tradition to go that far back. Wonder why it has eye brows though.

GUYS THIS IS AMAZING

SERIOUSLY

6000 YEARS

STORIES THAT ARE OLDER THAN CIVILIZATIONS

STORIES THAT WERE TOLD BY PEOPLE SPEAKING LANGUAGES WE NO LONGER KNOW

STORIES TOLD BY PEOPLE LOST TO THE VOID OF TIME

STORIES

GUYS LOOK AT THIS

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS

GUYYYYYSSSS

“Here’s how it worked: Fairy tales are transmitted through language, and the shoots and branches of the Indo-European language tree are well-defined, so the scientists could trace a tale’s history back up the tree—and thus back in time. If both Slavic languages and Celtic languages had a version of Jack and the Beanstalk (and the analysis revealed they might), for example, chances are the story can be traced back to the “last common ancestor.” That would be the Proto-Western-Indo-Europeans from whom both lineages split at least 6800 years ago. The approach mirrors how an evolutionary biologist might conclude that two species came from a common ancestor if their genes both contain the same mutation not found in other modern animals.” 

How do they control for stories that were borrowed, which almost certainly happened?

“ Unlike genes, which are almost exclusively transmitted “vertically”—from parent to offspring—fairy tales can also spread horizontally when one culture intermingles with another. Accordingly, much of the authors’ study focuses on recognizing and removing tales that seem to have spread horizontally. When the pruning was done, the team was left with a total of 76 fairy tales.”

This article doesn’t say how, but I bet those methods are in the paper.

For this, they used a library of cultural traits for each culture a fairy tale occurred in, and then measured the likelihood that trait t occurs in culture c due to either phylogenetic proximity (inheritance) or spatial proximity (diffusion), using autologistic regression:

(Autologistic regression is a graphical model where connected nodes have dependencies on each other, except instead of an undirected graph, ALR is a special case that requires sequential binary data and assumes a spatial ordering.  In this case, the binary data are the cultural features).

Cultural traits states are generated using Monte-Carlo simulation and phylogenetic or spatial influence are fitted as local dependencies between the nodes in the graph representing cultural traits.  I can’t find this in the paper (though it may be mentioned in the citation of the method they used), but presumably if the spatial influence exceeds the phylogenetic influence by a certain threshold, the trait is removed.

The full paper is here.

Mirror with a Handle in the Form of a Female Figure

3rd century BCE

Etruscan

In Etruria, bronze mirrors were luxury objects designed primarily for women, who were buried with them for use in the afterlife. The front of the bronze disk would have been highly polished in order to reflect the viewer’s image. This example has a handle in the form of a winged Lasa, a minor deity associated with Turan, the Etruscan goddess of love. Lasa holds an alabastron (container for scented oil) in her left hand. Because Lasa is thought to have been associated with funerary rites, the alabastron might evoke the ceremonial anointing of the dead.

Art Institute of Chicago