The Unimpaired Condition

(Not counting naturally occurring things like people and rocks and plants)

Consider things like coins, books, or family heirlooms! Tell me about it in the tags!

I guess this here hellsite is full of archaeo & hist nerds

Do not cite the old magic to me. I was there when it was written.

Sometimes I look at the Big Hair People in the comics I wrote back then and have to remind myself that, actually, they were, if anything, understated.

I remember once when I was in elementary school my high school age cousin had a crying fit cause for some reason the store was all out of aqua net

The end of this hairstyle single-handedly saved the ozone layer

What an incredible voyage through history as over 100 love letters from the 18th century have finally been opened! Penned over 250 years ago, these letters offer an extraordinary window into the lives of French Navy sailors and their loved ones.

In the club

I think I’m literally never gonna be sick of this masterpiece. I think watching it on a loop for eight hours could fix me. Dancing’s what clears my soul. Dancing’s what makes me whole.

Is this a world heritage post yet?

It doesn’t look that exciting, but this linen is from the New Kingdom (ca. 1492–1473 B.C.)

Thinking about it for too long makes me feel absolutely insane.

The description on The Met includes the line ‘The cloth was repaired and laundered in ancient times’ and that also makes me feel light-headed.

It’s so beautiful and so simple and so so old

I do appreciate what Cathy Hay has been doing of late. Her last video made me really emotional.

She has been trying to recreate the Peacock dress, designed by Worth and worn by Mary Curzon in 1903. It's a 10 pound chiffon dress of woven silver and gold thread.

Frankly, the embroidery is far more beautiful than its design.

But she's found it difficult to recreate, to say the least. The embroidery was done in colonised India, when The British Empire controlled and took credit for everything. And let me tell you, some of these Indian ateliers had a lot of people working on a single piece, because the designs are so intricate and elaborate.

And so, recently she's been more outspoken of the fact that British colonisation really enables these wealthy western Europeans to wear gowns that almost look impossibly beautiful, but rightful credit was of course never given to the people who made it. Cathy started talking about this during the height of media coverage of the ongoing Black Lives Matter protest. She said she was reflecting on her position in the world and the lens through which she saw the Peacock dress.

So Cathy Hay has been researching it's history. And she eventually found out the name of the man who owned the work shop that made it. Kishan Shand from Delhi. It was a firm owned by Manick Chand. And more importantly, she found a sketch of the men that worked there, around the period the embroidery probably would have been done. It was most likely those very same men.

And I just felt this lump in my throat. I always wonder about the craftsmen behind so much of history's most beautiful art. They're never named because the one who commissions the work, the patron, is usually given all the undue credit. We still don't know the individual names, but we have a sketch of their faces.

~ Plaque Depicting a Queen or Goddess.

Place of origin: Egypt

Date: 200 B.C.–30 B.C.

Medium: Limestone

Gay transgender activist Lou Sullivan spent years researching the life of Jack Garland, an obscure early 20th century transgender man who evidently loved men. He rifled though archived newspapers and letters in local libraries for any scrap relevant to Jack, and finally managed to get the completed novel published only very shortly before his death by AIDS in 1990. The book made a single run from a now-defunct publishing company, so a very limited number of copies of the book exist today. Approximately 30 libraries carry it across the US and certain sellers have another handful of copies available for upwards of $200+ each. However, I could afford to shell out that $200, and I think Lou would want his book to be accessible to the modern trans population. So I've bought a copy and scanned it and converted the pages into a PDF,

which is now public on google drive

and also Archive.org

Assyrian dog figurines with names carved on them, 650 BC “Expeller of evil” (mušēṣu lemnūti) with white pigment and red spots “Catcher of the enemy” (kāšid ayyāb) with red pigment “Don’t think, bite!” (ē tamtallik epuš pāka) with white pigment “Biter of his foe!” (munaššiku gārîšu) with turquoise pigment “Loud is his bark!” (dan rigiššu) with black pigment

(x) truest thing i’ve seen in a while

LiveJournal? Born yesterday.

I remember some of y'mfkrs from Yahoo groups and your tripod/geocities/angelfire pages.

I keep hate-reading plague literature from the medieval era, but as depressed as it makes me there is always one historical tidbit that makes me feel a little bittersweet and I like to revisit it. That’s the story of the village of Eyam.

Eyam today is a teeny tiny town of less than a thousand people. It has barely grown since 1665 when its population was around 800.

Where the story starts with Eyam is that in August 1665 the village tailor and his assistant discovered that a bolt of cloth that they had bought from London was infested with rat fleas. A few days later on September 7th the tailor’s assistant George Viccars died from plague.

Back then people didn’t fully understand how disease spread, but they knew in a basic sense that it did spread and that the spread had something to do with the movement of people.

So two religios leaders in the town, Thomas Stanley and William Mompesson, got together and came up with a plan. They would put the entire village of Eyam under quarantine. And they did. For over a year nobody went in and nobody went out.

They put up signs on the edge of town as warning and left money in vinegar filled basins that people from out of town would leave food and supplies by.

Over the 14 months that Eyam was in quarantine 260 out of the 800 residents died of plague. The death toll was high, the cost was great.

However, they did successfully prevent the disease from spreading to the nearby town of Sheffield, even then a much bigger town, and likely saved the lives of thousands of people in the north of England through their sacrifice.

So I really like this story, because it’s a sad story, because it’s also a beautiful story. Instead of fleeing everyone in this one place agreed that they would stay, and they saved thousands of people. They stayed just to save others and I guess it’s one of those good stories about how people have always been people, for better or worse.

It gets better.

Here’s the thing. One third of the residents of Eyam died during their quarantine, but the Black Plague was known to have a NINETY PERCENT death rate. As high as the toll was, it wasn’t as high as it should have been. And a few hundred years later, some historians and doctors got to wondering why.

Fortunately, Eyam is one of those wonderful places that really hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. Researchers, going to visit, found that many of the current residents were direct descendants of the plague survivors from the 1600s. By doing genetic testing, they learned that a high number of Eyam residents carried a gene that made them immune to the plague. And still do.

And it gets even better than that, because the gene that blocks the Black Plague? Also turns out to block AIDS, and was instrumental in helping to find effective medication for people who have HIV and AIDS in the 21st century.

Here is a lovely, well-produced documentary about Eyam and its disease resistance. It’s a little under an hour. Trigger warning for general disease and epidemic-type stuff, but also, maybe it will help you have some hope in these alarmly uncertain times.