There may or may not be a method to this madness.

Anonymous asked: a dumb question, maybe, but: what's one of your favorite parts about studying classics?

argonauticae:

probably the constant reminders that throughout time and regardless of time, place, language, religion, ideology, system of governance or dominant school of thought, people remain fundamentally people

like i know that sounds really glib but it’s like - when i was doing this after alexander course last year, right, we looked at this thing called the zenon papyri, a huge stash of administrative documents from greek-ruled egypt addressed to an official called zenon, which was preserved because the winds changed and the building they were kept in was buried under a massive sand dune. and there’s one which we called the krotos papyri, which is a letter from a native egyptian writing to zenon telling him how he had been mistreated by greeks, who laugh at him because he doesn’t know how to “act like a greek” and call him a barbarian and refuse to pay him his proper wages. which is very familiar. and when you look at the actual papyrus fragment, the writing at the top is big and clear and spaced-out, but as it gets towards the bottom of the page it gets smaller and more cramped and the lines are all squint, because this nameless egyptian guy who does something with camels in the 250s BC hadn’t worked out how long his letter was going to be and he’s realised halfway through that he’s going to run out of space

and in first year i went on this trip to hadrian’s wall, and it started snowing while we were standing on it and the wind was blowing a gale right into our faces, and afterwards we heard a lecture about the vindolanda tablets, and there’s one, tablet 346, a letter to a soldier stationed there - and the soldiers stationed there could come from anywhere in the empire, rome or egypt or north africa, hot places, basically, and the wall is fucking cold - which is maybe from his wife or mother or sister, which reads as follows:

“… I have sent (?) you … pairs of socks from Sattua, two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants, two pairs of sandals … Greet …ndes, Elpis, Iu…, …enus, Tetricus and all your messmates with whom I pray that you live in the greatest good fortune.“  

and that’s not some kind of “people don’t change” idea. people do change, have changed. you read the stuff these civilisations produced and some of it is so, so alien to us, so hard to understand, so strange. but then in amongst it you find things like people running out of space on their last bit of paper, or sending their son more socks because he’s got a job somewhere cold. and we remember it, these weird small human things, by total random chance! no-one sat down and thought ‘let’s keep this’ - the wind changes and an entire archive of papyri is preserved under a sand dune for 2000 years. the excavators who found the vindolanda tablets thought they were wood shavings. there’s a pot of roman face cream in the museum of london which still has fingerprints in the cream, which was found hidden in a ditch outside a temple. and in the meantime, we have no firsthand accounts of the campaigns of alexander, one of the most influential series of events in western history, because… we just don’t. they existed, but they’re lost. for some reason, somehow, presumably though some kind of enormous cosmic joke, we have a fragmentary letter from an anonymous person sent to an anonymous soldier telling him his pants are in the post and to say hello to his friends, but we don’t have callisthene’s deeds of alexander or ptolemy’s memoirs. isn’t that infuriating? isn’t that great? 

thedoormowse:

ironbite4:

sindri42:

lesbianshepard:

lesbianshepard:

apparently native american tribes were in contact with the donner party and offered them food when they saw the colonists were starving and the donner party turned them down and decided to go the whole “cannibalism” route instead. 

Until now the Native American perspective has been left out of the telling of the Donner tragedy, not because the wel mel ti did not remember the pioneers, but because they were never asked, or perhaps were not ready to share. Their oral tradition recalls the starving strangers who camped in an area that was unsuitable for that time of year. Taking pity on the pioneers, the northern Washoe attempted to feed them, leaving rabbit meat and wild potatoes near the camps. Another account states that they tried to bring the Donner Party a deer carcass, but were shot at as they approached. Later, some wel mel ti observed the migrants eating human remains. Fearing for their lives, the area’s native inhabitants continued to watch the strangers but avoided further contact. These stories, and the archaeological evidence that appears to support them, certainly complicated my interpretation of the Donner Party event. The migrants at Alder Creek were not surviving in the mountains alone—the northern Washoe were there, and they had tried to help.  (source)

tfw a group of unprepared strangers show up, refuse the food you offer them, start fucking cannibalizing each other, and then call you the savages

The story of the Donner Party is hilarious to me because like, everybody talks about them like these brave pioneers who made the ultimate sacrifice in pursuit of their destiny or whatever the fuck, but they were just complete dumbasses.

Like, have you ever heard of the Murphy Party? Sometimes called the  Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party? They were the first wagon train of the pioneers to make it over the Sierra Nevada, two full years before the Donners tried it, first of the american pioneers to reach the shores of lake Tahoe, first licensed physician in California, etc. etc. Ten families, about fifty people, not a single casualty (they actually arrived with more people than when they left). Because when the Donners picked the most charismatic city boy as their leader, the Murphys picked a mountain man. Where the Donners decided to take a “shortcut” that was completely impassable based on a letter they got from somebody who wanted to drum up business for a trading post he was building but who had never actually driven a wagon, the Murphys scouted properly and stuck to paths their vehicles could actually traverse. Where the Donners decided to shoot at the people who were already living in the area, the Murphys asked the natives for directions. When they got snowed in, they sent a few men on ahead to bring back supplies to the rest of the party after building a sturdy cabin for shelter, instead of trying to hole up in shoddy tents and lean-tos before eating each other.

Not to mention all the idiotic in-fighting in the Donner party; they were constantly brawling or stabbing each other or exiling people or just leaving old men on the side of the path to die or “accidentally” shooting their rivals while cleaning weapons, while literally hundreds of other wagon trains somehow made it through the same trials without any murder.

So naturally, the Donners got a lake and a pass and a state park named after them and became household words, while anybody who wasn’t a complete moron got maybe a local park or a small creek.

Daaaaaaaaaamn.

It gets even better!

Donner was not the original leader of the group- the expedition started out under the leadership of a man named Reed, who did know what he was doing and had lead several groups safely to the Oregon Territory before.

When they reached the point where the new “California Trail” diverged from the Oregon Trail Donner convinced a large portion of the group to join him and travel across the Sierras.

Reed knew this was a very, very bad idea but Donner was apparently just- extremely charismatic and persuasive. Not only did the Reed Party safely make it to Oregon, as originally planned, but Reed immediately headed south as fast as he humanly could, and upon reaching Sacramento recruited a rescue party to bring emergency supplies up from the other side of the pass.

Unfortunately, it was already too late in the year and the weather forced the rescue party to turn back. Despite knowing the odds against the Donner Party surviving Reed refused to assume their deaths and stayed in Sacramento waiting for the mountain trail to clear.

So not only did Reed warn them not to, he was also the one that found the survivors afterwards.

Fuck Donner.

(via knitmeapony)

ohmazgosh:

stillwaitingformagic:

ohmazgosh:

all-the-worlds-a-stag:

tanoraqui:

swingsetindecember:

january-summers:

swingsetindecember:

in movies, when a scientist is held hostage and is forced to make a bomb or virus, like my guy, those villains don’t know shit about science. just make a gumball machine, my dude

eighth grade science fair volcano, but fancy looking

 i just want once where the villain is like, you are too late, i detonated the device and instead of doom and gloom it is just confetti sparklers with abba’s waterloo playing and the scientist is like, bitch you thought 

every time a scientist gets kidnapped to build a terrible weapon, they think about just bullshitting it, but then a tiny voice in the back of their mind says, but don’t you want to see if you can? don’t you want to laugh madly as you show them all? don’t you want to just go feral?

Honestly when’s the next time you’ll get this kind of grant funding?

Not to get all serious on this delightful post, but it just occurred to me that the US government kept scientists working on the Manhattan Project in the dark about what they were working on because if they knew they were building an actual doomsday device, they ABSOLUTELY would have either sabotaged it or quit. Turns out real life villains are more cunning and real life scientists are more upstanding than in fiction.

I thought the Manhattan project was just a marvel thing????

Nope! I’m not sure how the Manhattan Project is portrayed in the Marvel movies (although now I’m curious to see how they might have spun it), but the Manhattan Project was the development of the first atomic bomb in the 1940s. And the vast majority of people working on it had no clue what they were building.

I think part of it really was that if people knew what they were building, they would have quit, but the secrecy also had a lot to do with keeping American military secrets from reaching The Enemy. You know, this kind of stuff: 

According to Wikipedia, "probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved.“ When scientists started to figure out what they were building, they were told they’re making a “gadget”. *insert eyeroll*

When the scientists and workers who built the bombs turned on the radio and heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they instantly knew what they had been working on. Imagine, the sudden realization that you played a hand in the deaths of 200,000 people. You’re a scientist; you’re supposed to make the world a better, more enlightened place, not dole out death and devastation.

But scientists, being humanists, continued to try to mitigate the damage of the bomb after finding out what it really was: 

• Some who had realized how dangerous it could be before the bombs were launched tried to persuade the president or the military that it was unnecessary to have to actually launch the bombs.  
• After the bombings, The Pugwash Conferences were established to try to outlaw the use of atomic weapons globally.
• Oppenheimer, the physicist who was the lab director at Los Alamos and literal “father of the atomic bomb”, went on to lobby for international arms control (and was later accused of being a Communist and stripped of his security clearance).

This article has some really great info about how the scientists working on the bomb reacted when they found out what it was: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/08/07/manhattan-project-scientists-atomic-bomb-hiroshima-nagasaki-column/3305404001/?fbclid=IwAR0VY4iVjtqf7mBYj3KCJ5dKCMqU9AuHEUDRNDIzEPrXR7ftxEwRz1X6D7s

TL;DR Basically, in real life, scientists will not want to work on your villainous death device unless they literally don’t know what they’re working on, and when they figure it out, they will try to convince the villain not to use the death device, and when the villain inevitably uses the death device, they will continue to try to do damage control. And this, kids, is why you never accept a job working for the US Military.

(via the-ladyguinevere)

lianneinthebigworld:

petermorwood:

fangirlnado:

A few days ago I went to guédelon and it was the most amazing thing ever

Over the last twenty years they have been working on building a medieval fortress by hand with building methods that would have been used in the 13. century. They expect to be done in about six or seven years

The castle is ‘standardized’ because about a thousand castles were build at the same time by King Phillip II. as a defnece against the english

It already looks beautiful just like that

The even move the stones around on little carriages that have to be moved by two people

Even all the safety structures are made by hand and out of wood (while they are safe just like that, they have to be screwed together as well so they are up to today’s standards)

This will be the highest and most secure tower where the owner would escape to, should the castle be under siege. It has its own water and works mostly independent from the rest of the castle.

These are the wheels used to lift the stones and get them to the top of the wall. They are still moved by people walking inside and the only thing they added was a break so it’s safer otherwise this is a complete reconstruction

The small chapel has the most beautiful window which was made completely by hand and it’s so symmetrical it’s unbelievable

Also there was a little nest of swallows in the chapel which made it extra amazing

The great hall is the only room with very big windows which made the room very lovely and bright. Below the great hall is the storage connected to the kitchen. Above the kitchen behind the great hall is a guest room which would be the warmes room since the cooking fire would be burning below it.

The guest room also had beautiful paintings and the even made the pigment for it themselves

There was so much more and it was so interesting I could have stayed there forever. Anyone who is interested in medieval history and has a chance to go there should definitely do that

I’m gonna stop now because tumblr won’t let me add any more pictures and I have way too much to say about this because they showed so much amazing stuff

There’s a BBC documentary series about this project - “Secrets of the Castle“ - by the same team who did “Victorian Farm” etc.

The whole thing is on the Timeline Channel at Youtube, and well worth a look.

Definitely go watch this on youtube, it’s amazing! 

They show how part of the tower is built, how that beautiful window gets made, how the painting and decorating was done etc, but also how all these people used to live around a castle and they show the miraculous skills all these workers have. It’s one of my favourite things on youtube! 

The historians that made this show also made a bunch of others on farming in different historical periods. They are all on youtube and I have seen all of them at leat 4 times ^__^ 

(via lochiels)

junewild asked:

your tag “sometimes a historian is someone who etches marks on the wall to catalogue your growth” made me clutch my chest and sit down. yes. i’m literally going into a public history grad program next year and you just casually summed up the entire field and why i love it. thank you

catadromously:

here is a gravestone from ancient Athens, a young girl with her favorite pets.

here is a food-sharing scene from the Maya site Calakmul. when they remodeled the building, the people there packed this mural with mud to preserve it.

here is a child’s footprint stamped into clay in Mesopotamia more than 2000 years ago. many of these have been found, and some are inscribed with the children’s names. 

we don’t want to forget each other. that’s history.

moroccanmanga:

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.

(via omgthatdress)

mobius-ofc:

uncle-beanbag:

frogparty:

frogparty:

nobody talks about it but like the fact that glasses exist is literally insane

put fucking melted sand in front of your eyeballs and now stuff stops being blurry??? and someone figured this out fuckin hundreds of years ago?

Glass technology evolved because of wine.

Wine used to be stored in clay pots for drinking but then people started blowing glass and realized how pretty wine was in a clear glass bottles. They also realized that glass bottles with curves magnified the image and after decades of experementation they started grinding glass with curves and sand to get that magnification. This is also where the telescope and magnifying glass came from. Eventually after telescopes and looking to the heavens were all the rage people started hand crafting reading glasses which gave their wearers an extra decade of reading with bad eyes. By the mid 1700’s they were common and Ben Franklin figured out how to combine two different magnifications into one lense. By 1900 it was incredibly common to have eyeglasses and actual perscriptions were being developed. Post WWII saw a boom in lense technology filtering down from industrial applications making it cheaper and more affordable. Now days you can typically walk into a dollar store and buy a pair of reading glasses all thanks to some glass blower a thousand years ago that liked to look at his wine.

All of human history comes down to alcohol and horses

(via big-tiddy-goth-ghoulfriend)