@wtfhistory / wtfhistory.tumblr.com
My favorite source was Roman Warfare (Smithsonian History of Warfare) by Adrian Goldsworthy. I would do another one of my PowerPoints on Roman tactics, but I doubt that’s in high demand.
The last image came from ‘education.blurtit.com’, which, altogether, isn’t a half-bad website.
Ohhh, glorious!
A quick look at: the gladiators of Rome
“I turned in to the games one mid-day hoping for a little wit and humor there. I was bitterly disappointed. It was really mere butchery. […] Then men were thrown to lions and to bears: but at midday to the audience. There was no escape for them. The slayer was kept fighting until he could be slain. “Kill him! Flog him! Burn him alive” was the cry: “Why is he such a coward? Why won’t he rush on the steel? Why does he fall so meekly? Why won’t he die willingly?" (Via the Internet Ancient History Sourcebook).
The above passage is given by Roman historian Seneca (Epistles 7), offering us a vivid (albeit, aristocratic) eyewitness account of gladiatorial games in the age of Nero. A unique product of Rome and Italy, the sensation of gladiators has become one of the most famous aspects of Roman society, and epitomizes the Roman taste for blood sports.
There never seemed to have been a shortage of willing participants in Rome for this grim life. Candidates were originally found among captives and slaves, those with nothing to lose. However, as the popularity of the sport continued to grow, so did the need for other avenues of supply. During the empire, noblemen were sent by emperors into the arena for committing crimes. Freedmen and imperial citizens came to enter the auctorati, a class of people who sold themselves to gladiator schools. The auctorati gave an oath of service, by which they agreed to submit to burning, beating, and death if they didn’t perform the tasks required of them as gladiators. As we may imagine, it took a truly desperate man to enter into such a grim life of combat and death, a measure that was prompted in times of economic or political hardship. This was a way to escape debtors for those in poverty.
Shown at the top of the post are a series of Roman mosaics depicting gladiatorial scenes. The first is from the Villa Borghese, and on view at the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Note the names of the gladiators inscribed next to the figures, and the Θ symbol (it seems likely here that it is the Greek letter Θ for θάνατος, 'dead'), which marks those who have died in combat. The second mosaic is from Römerhalle in Germany, and the remaining mosaics are from the Roman villa in Nennig, Germany.
The first image is via the Wiki Commons, and the rest are courtesy of & taken by Carole Raddato.
Hairstyles of Ancient Rome
"Hairstyle fashion in Rome was ever changing, and particularly in the Roman Imperial Period there were a number of different ways to style hair. Much the same with clothes, there were several hairstyles that were limited to certain people in ancient society. Styles are so distinctive they allow scholars today to create a chronology of Roman portraiture and art; we are able to date pictures of the empresses on coins, or identify busts depending on their hairstyles."
"Busts themselves could have detachable wigs. There have been many suggestions as to why some busts have been created with detachable wigs and some without. Perhaps the main reason was to keep the bust looking up-to-date. It would have been too expensive to commission a new bust every time hair fashion changed, so a mix-and-match bust would have been preferable for women with less money." [X]
inspiration
"However, long before the mythical Hades was ever conceived, in more ancient, pre-patriarchal times, Persephone was Queen of the Underworld and was another form of Hecate. Originally, the Triple Goddess was represented by Kore, the virgin; Demeter, the mother preserver; and Hecate or Persephone, the destroyer. In later years, Kore and Persephone became the same Goddess. The pomegranate was an ancient symbol of female fertility; the souls of the underworld ate pomegranates so that they could be reborn. They are standing in front of a bas-relief of their reunion from Eleusis, Greece, early 5th century BCE and are holding Boetian figures used in the Demeter and Persephone rites from the mid 6th century BCE. Demeter’s ribbed seed necklace is from Kourion, 400-300 BCE; her earring is part of a pendant with 2 bees from Mallia, Middle Minoan, 1700-1550 BCE. Persephone’s pomegranate pendant is from Enkomi, Cyprus, 1400-1300 BCE; her earring is from Mycenae, 1550-1500 BCE; her bracelet from Thessaly, 8th century BCE.” (x)
"In another sense a process was completed that had been in motion since the dawn of the patriarchy. In the earliest representations of the story of Demeter and Persephone, only the Goddesses were present. As the patriarchy gained power, the story was changed. Persephone, instead of going of her own free will into the underworld, was abducted by the (now male) God of Death and became his captive bride. In the stories of Ishtar and Inanna, male “consorts” were introduced. In the legend of Isis, the Dying Goddess became the male Osiris.” (x)
“The rape motif in the story underscores that the Hellenic takeover was a violent one that wrested power from women. In the words of Robert Graves, “It refers to male usurpation of the female agricultural mysteries in primitive times.”” (x)
Basically, if you can’t grasp that fact that Persephone’s rape was a patriarchal representation and installation of the Greek’s doing as a means to oppress Goddess worship and the matriarchy, wow, I don’t know even know what do for you.
A remarkably preserved Roman coffin, and a child’s shoe found within it. Excavated by Wessex Archaeology at Boscombe Down, Wiltshire, England.
This burial is the earliest in its cemetery, and dates to around 220 AD. Later burials are clustered around it.
When the archaeologists lifted the lid of this stone coffin, they were surprised to find that it had not been filled with soil. Instead was the skeleton of a woman cradling in her arms a young child. Check out this video if you’re interested in seeing the part of the excavation.
Of the items in the coffin, the child’s leather shoe (pictured) survived. Laces that strapped the shoe can be clearly seen, as well as the holes for stitching the shoe together. The woman’s deer skin slippers also survived.
"The preservation of the shoes is remarkable. Because the processes of decay were quite slow we also have traces of cloth that have been preserved by a chemical reaction with the metal bangle. We even have traces of the puparia from which the coffin flies that infested the body hatched. Squeamish but fascinating!"
-Dr Andrew Fitzpatrick of Wessex Archaeology
Photos courtesy Wessex Archaeology.
Not many people know the stereotypical heart shape was meant to be two hearts fused together
Hey there. History nerd here… not many people know this “fact” because it’s not true. The universal heart shape we recognize today has nothing to do with the heart, actually. It has to do with early Roman birth control. The Romans used a plant called silphium to prevent pregnancy. It was so effective that it became a critical part of Rome’s economy and daily life. It was literally so important to their culture that the image of it’s seed were even imprinted on currency. It’s the exact shape of the heart we know today, and this is the first time it’s visage was ever recorded in history. It was so important to them, and so highly prized that they actually drove the plant into extinction by over harvesting it for use. This shape was so ingrained in their society’s conscious as a symbol of sexual liberation that it became associated with all aspects of intimacy, eg. sex, unity, and love. TL;DR: It’s not two hearts sewn together. It’s an ancient plant that Romans used to have gratuitous amounts of sex before condoms were around.
Always remember
no, seriously this dude was insane
he’s most famous for trying to make is horse a senator and according to Wikipedia he made him a priest instead
he thought he was a god and wanted people to worship his statues
he was allegedly in an incestuous relationship with his sister
and I remember watching this video about him where he thought seashells were more valuable than gold
like, I can never keep a straight face when Caligula comes up in conversation until I remember that he was also a tyrant who caused a lot of starvation and killed people when he was bored
Also Caligula wasn't even his name. His name was Gaius. "Caligula" was a nickname that meant "little boots" - because when he was a kid his father brought him on military campaigns and he'd wear tiny soldier's boots.
Hail crazy Emperor Booties!
Ancient Gamers – The Games of Old
If there is one thing that transcends time and space, it’s gaming. For tens of thousands of years, children and adults from all over the world have invented, played and mastered thousands of different games. Board games, dice games, games that require only the hands of the participants - someone, somewhere, at some point in time thought of an exciting new game. Some were successful, others fell back into obscurity. Chances are many of the games you played as a child (hopscotch, knucklebones) have been in existence for far longer than you think. In fact, there are quite a few games we play as adults that go back to ancient times. So without further ado, here is a selection of the most interesting games of yore.
Board Games
Despite a plethora of uncovered gaming boards, pieces and other related artefacts, we need to take into account that we’re missing a lot of information on rules, the origins and the geographical distribution. What we do know is that these type of games would have required moving pieces around a board. It seems pretty straightforward, because we’ve all been raised with Ludo and Monopoly, but it needs to be mentioned. Some of these required skill while others were strategy based, and more often than not pure luck played its part.
Senet
The oldest mention of this Egyptian game comes from the third Dynasty tomb of Hesire, Chief of Dentists. It was played by both the elite and the common people, for over three thousand years, until it was rejected in the Late Roman Period because of its then-pagan symbolism. A similar game has been found in Arad, Canaan, but it’s unsure whether Senet has its origins in either one of these countries, or if the games have developed separately.
The board is arranged in three columns of ten squares each. It has two sets of game pieces, usually five of either kind, though there are more extensive games found with more pawns, as well as a few with less. The rules are a question of debate, though there have been made some educated guesses by specialists. Based on these guesses, several companies have made Senet games for sale.
Latrunculi
The Romans were very fond of dice. As such, hardly any of their board games did not feature these. Latrunculi is one of the very few. This game is somewhat alike to modern day chess, as it is played on a square board divided into a grid. The name, which means ‘soldier-game’, gives us an indication on the nature of Latrunculi as a strategy game. We know quite a bit about it thanks to such figures as Varro and Ovid, who have left us a good idea of how the game was played in writing.
The game pieces were coloured glass pawns and called calculi, latrones, or milites. The pieces could be moved both forwards and backwards, and a piece was taken after being surrounded by two enemy pieces in rank or file. Blocking played a big part, and a player with good strategic skill could extract himself from a block. Backwards moves were a strategic retreat, and the entire game of Latrunculi had all aspects of a military battle: the player who took the most enemy pieces won, and was called the imperator.
The Game of Twenty Squares
This game, also known as The Royal Game of Ur, is a board game found in royal tombs dating from the first Dynasty of Ur, around 2600 B.C. The board itself has a peculiar shape: a three by four grid is connected to a two by three grid by a single column of two. It’s decorated with six different patterns. The pawns were two sets of markers, one black and one white, blank on one side and marked on the other. Three tetrahedral dice are also used. We don’t know exactly how the game would be played in the earliest of times, but a reconstruction could be made based on a Babylonian tablet dating from around 177 B.C.
Like Senet, Twenty Squares is a racing game part skill and strategy, and part luck. Also like Senet, modern incarnations of this game are for sale. There are different versions of the modern rules: in one, players race along the inner and outer tracks much like a game of Ludo, and in another the players must occupy all squares of two different patterns before the other does.
Dice Games
Dice games are perhaps more difficult to reconstruct, because in most case we lack a playing board – after all, all you need for a nice game of dice is a handful of dice. Most of these games involved values given to a particular side on the die, then simply rolling the dice and making sure you have the highest total value to win.
Ludus duodecim scriptorum
Other games required an additional playing board, such as the Roman game of Scriptorum. The board for this game existed out of three rows of twelve letters, arranged into two columns, that formed a sentence. Most of the board we have found have symbols, circles or semicircles drawn between each pair of horizontal words. Unfortunately, we don’t know enough about the rules of this game to make an educated guess beyond that it was akin to backgammon.
Children’s Games
One of the most widely played children’s games has been around since time immemorial: knucklebones. It was originally played with five ‘knucklebones’ of a sheep, and the rules are simple. The child throws the bones in the air and catches them, usually on the back of the hand, in a series of prescribed throws and catches. The child that’s the first to manage the full set of throws in a row, wins.
Other names for knucklebones include astragaloi, dibs, and chuckstones. The origin isn’t quite sure, it seems to be one of those games that many cultures came up with on their own. Sophocles, for instance, ascribes the invention to Palamedes during the Trojan War, while in another legend Zeus is said to have presented Ganymede with both a new playmate (Eros) and a set of gold dibs for them to play with. On the other hand, Plato mentions the game as having been invented by the Egyptian god Toth, while Herodotus tells us the Lydians created it during a period of famine.
Whatever the origin, knucklebones is still played by children the world over today, using, now as then, a wide variety of materials, from pebbles to specially fabricated plastic pieces.
Gambling
It is not a big endeavour to make a gambling game out of any old game: you simply bet money on the outcome. That said, there are games that have been designed as gambling games right from the outset (such as most dice games). One of the most famous of these games is:
Mahjong
Perhaps the most extensive game out there, a full game of Mahjong can take up to two days (believe me, I’ve tried!) No, we’re not talking about the online game of playing out pairs: Mahjong as it’s supposed to be played is a cross between domino, rummikub and poker. The rules are many and so elaborate that it’d require an article on its own to even start explaining them all, but the basics are as such: four players, each representing a wind, have a hand full of tiles (14). Each turn, they’ll exchange one tile from either the stack or the discard pile, until they have a strategic hand of pairs, called a Mahjong. While it was a gambling game pur sang, nowadays it’s being played without money changing hands.
The origin of Mahjong is unclear, though myth suggests that it was Confucius who invented it. The name would come from his fondness of birds, because it bears a resemblance to maque (麻雀), sparrow. Historians now believe the game is a fair bit younger than this, and was based on a forty-card game called Mǎdiào (馬吊), Hanging Horse.
Kottabos
Not so much a gambling game as a drinking game, this Greek game originating around the fifth or fourth century B.C., and required players to fling the dregs of wine at a target while uttering the name of the object of their affection. This target was a bronze standard with a small disk on top called a plastinx. When done correctly, the thrown wine would knock the plastinx down and make it hit a larger disk called the manes, which would cause a bell-like sound. This was done without getting up from the table, and the player could only use his right hand. Sometimes objects of value were staked on the outcome of the game, and considering the game required men flinging their leftover wine at a target, it got more difficult as the night progressed.
(Image sources: The British Museum - paraphernalia; Ur & The Metropolitan Museum of Art - astragaloi)
In honour of International Table Top Day today, we bring you an appropriate reblog of one of our earlier articles.
You can find more articles and object posts on gaming here.
Happy gaming!
As an avid table top gamer, this is highly inspiring.
Pictured above: the oldest known wine still in a liquid state, from a Roman tomb in Germany.
It has an oaky nose with a dusty, almost mummified finish.
Roman Lamp
Broneer XXVIIC
Made by Preimos in Athens
251-310 AD
A mould made pottery lamp decorated with an erotic scene of a woman and a horse on a bed.
Source: British Museum
CT scans of the mummy of a young woman in McGill University’s Redpath Museum have allowed researchers to recreate a hairstyle that was popular in Roman-ruled Egypt, nearly 2,000 years ago.
...I would wear my hair like that.
Quick! Somebody altert the hipster blogs!
Warning - this article contains an image which may cause distress
As you may have noticed the big exhibition on at the moment at the British Museum is the one on Pompeii. Having recently visited it I’d say it was good, if not a little crowded (particularly when the...
This is fascinating. I wish I knew more about volcanic eruptions so I could understand this more deeply!
Great read. 10/10 would spasm over.
Some graffiti found in Pompeii’s ruins:
Nice to see nothing has changed.
absolutely nothing has changed
Retweeting again for the joy of Pompeiian graffiti. God, what their texts and tweets would have been like…
tell me one more time how history is dull I dare you
“Satura was here on September 3rd”
nice to know that society hasn’t changed a bit
there are like at least 3 that are like “lol i pooped here” and several more that are like “hey whoever is pooping here better cut it out”
Oh HELLLLL yes.
Don't judge me. The source is legit, I checked it three times.
Damn what a fucker this kid was.
I think if Freud was around with the Romans he would have a god damn field day. Freud had this theory about the stages of psychosexual development and one of the stages was to do with the junk and being fixated on it. It was weird and he made it weirder by tying in the Oedipus/Electra complexes but you know what, Freud was fucked let’s leave it at that. My point was: Penises. Romans dug them.
Take this excerpt from Pompeii Awakened by Judith Harris
THEY CONFUSED A BAKERY FOR A BROTHEL.
HEY BABY, I CAN MAKE YOUR BREAD RISE.
SOMETHING, SOMETHING YEAST.
I took it too far. I’m sorry.
But it’s one of those really funny ‘Boy, is this embarrassing’ stories of archaeologists viewing the past with modern eyes and in doing so getting it wrong. NICE GOING, CHUMPS.
I’m kidding archaeologists. I love you. Never change.
OH MY GOD THIS IS FUCKING HILARIOUS.
THIS IS MARRIAGE!!
Thats right!
Permission to be a bad ass. Nod.
He looks back at the guy like, “SEE THAT? SHE SAID YES. YOU’RE SO FUCKED.”
Like, guys. Sparta was so kick ASS sometimes when it came to women. Spartan women were given these small knives so that if their husbands came home and tried to hit them or assault them, they had a weapon within reach. That weapon was for CUTTING THEIR HUSBANDS’ FUCKING FACES so that when he went out in public everyone would know he was an asshole, abusing jerkface and they would publicly shame him.
I DID NOT KNOW THAT THAT IS GREAT
LET'S JUST TALK ABOUT SPARTAN WOMEN FOR A SECOND.
In Sparta, women could own land and were considered citizens. THAT IS A HUGE BIG FUCKING DEAL. Why? Because that was RARE AS FUCK and there are lots of places TODAY where women don't even get that much.
Divorce was totally fine, and a woman could expect to keep her own wealth and get custody of the kids because paternal lineage wasn't very important. And it didn't make her a pariah! She could totally remarry, no big deal at all.
Spartan women participated in some fuckin' badass sporting events, too. And because they were expected to be as physically fit as the Spartan menfolk (who all had to serve compulsory military duties, btw, and couldn't marry until they finished them at thirty) they didn't have time for lots of swishy dresses. So they wore notoriously short skirts. According to some accounts, their thighs were visible at all times. HOLY SHIT.
Also, In Sparta men only got their names on their graves if they died in battle. And women? Women only got their names on their graves if they died in childbirth. THE SPARTANS COMPARED CHILDBIRTH TO FUCKING BATTLE AND IT WAS VIEWED AS A GODDAMN BADASS AND HONORABLE WAY TO GO OUT.
FUCKING SPARTAN WOMEN. THIS DUDE HAD FUCKIN' BETTER MAKE SURE SHE'S COOL WITH WHATEVER HE'S DOING, IF HE KNOWS WHAT'S FUCKIN' GOOD FOR HIM.
