System Metternich posted:

That's super interesting, can you recommend some literature about it?

Vaginal Vagrant posted:

Quidam Viator marry me.

System Metternich posted:

That's super interesting, can you recommend some literature about it?

Aubergine Mage posted:

That was wonderful

alriclofgar on Reddit posted:

On a purely practical level, bronze makes better weapons than (pure) iron. Bronze has a Vicker's hardness (HV) of about 300, while pure iron is closer to 100HV. Practically speaking, that means that iron weapons are more difficult to keep sharp and are more likely to bend. You may have heard of the passage from Caesar's Gallic Wars where the barbarian warriors have to stop mid-battle and straighten their bent iron swords? Metallographic analyses of surviving swords from the period suggest that this was probably a true story. Gallic swords were typically made from pure iron with very high ductility (easily bent), and would not have stood up well to a protracted fight. Early iron weapons were, on the whole, not very good, and this didn't really change until steel became widespread in the early middle ages. Given a choice between a well-made bronze spear and an iron spear from antiquity, I would probably choose to fight with the bronze.

The real reason for the shift from iron to bronze had more to do with economics and, probably, with magic.

Copper and tin are both relatively rare, and access to bronze depended, consequentially, on maintaining long trade routes to ensure steady supply. Single Bronze Age copper mines like the one on Great Orm (Wales) appear to have provided copper for a wide geographic area, and the community which controlled it must have leveraged their monopoly to enormous social advantage. Iron ore, in contrast, is much more common, making it easier to produce a stockpile of weapons locally without having to trade with distant monopolies. The greatest limit on local iron production is charcoal, as smelting iron ore into useful metal requires a lot of trees.

Most scholars agree that the collapse of long-range trade routes around the 12th century BC (the 'Greek Dark Age' or 'Bronze Age Collapse') pushed many people to become more reliant on local resources, which sparked the slow transition to reliance on iron weapons.

The transition from bronze to iron took a long time, though - bronze weapons and armor remained common well into the 1st millennium BC. This is almost certainly in part due to bronze's superiority over pure, soft iron, but also may have been connected to the 'magical' or ritual functions of weaponry in the ancient world. Chris Gosden recently made this argument, suggesting that the conceptual shift from bronze to iron working required more than the development of new technological processes. Bronze is melted into a liquid and cast into a mold, while iron is hammered into shape while still a solid (it's only much later that the technology to cast weapons-grade iron became available in the western world). Switching from one metal to the other wasn't, therefore, as simple as swapping out one material for the other. It required both new technological processes and a new understanding of what a metal could be and what it could do. Bronze was a liquid, and Gosden notes that bronze weapons were frequently thrown into water as sacrifices. Iron, in contrast, is more closely connected with the soil (iron ore is often rusty sand, iron is worked as a solid instead of a liquid, and - left alone - iron quickly transforms back into rusty dirt), and Gosden notes that iron technology really took off on in many parts of Europe only after there was a cultural shift away from religious / magical rituals connected with water toward new rituals concerned with fertility and the ground (and in these rituals, iron - instead of bronze - objects start to be sacrificed). It was only with this conceptual shift, Gosden argues, in which earth - and iron - replaced bronze's ritual, magical role that people were willing to embrace the new material and finally abandon bronze weapons.

So when an army equipped itself with iron weapons instead of bronze, it wasn't a simple trade of bad/old technology for newer/better. The new iron weapons were likely more difficult to keep sharp and more likely to be damaged. They were, however, also likely less expensive (or at least, easier to come by locally without reaching too far afield), which meant you could arm a larger warband in your back yard than in the old bronze-dominated economy. And the new iron weapons likely had different ritual and magical associations which made them more (or less) suitable for the grim business to come. All these factors were ultimately much more significant than the simple hardness of the metal.

Platystemon posted:

Cite is: Gosden, C., (2012), Material, Magic and Matter: understanding different ontologies: in “Maran, J. and Stockhammer, P. (eds) Materiality and Social Practice. Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters”, pp 13-19, Oxford: Oxbow Books.

quote:

At DEFCON 2 or higher, the Looking Glass pilot and co-pilot were both required to wear an eye patch, retrieved from their Emergency War Order (EWO) kit. In the event of a surprise blinding flash from a nuclear detonation, the eye patch would prevent blindness in the covered eye, thus enabling them to see in at least one eye and continue flying. Later, the eye patch was replaced by goggles that would instantaneously turn opaque when exposed to a nuclear flash, then rapidly clear for normal vision.

Siivola posted:

Okay, that's actually super fascinating. How's all that intersect with modern-day societies where things like witchcraft, possession and such are still accepted as valid? For instance, Turner's work among the Ndembu springs to mind.

Quidam Viator posted:

Ummmm....I don't know what to say. I'm not used to people liking my stuff, so some part of me feels like I'm being trolled. I have some kind of SA-related trauma, apparently. So, thanks?

I could try to pull up my graduate thesis from 16 years ago, before I started teaching, but more than anything, I found that there was no real literature that specifically did what I was trying to do. And I don't blame academics for that; you can see how much I have to keep hedging. Really picky readers could attack anything I put forward as a really concrete hypothesis as to when cultures really internalized, metaphorized and verbalized their lateralization preferences.

"OH YEAH??? Well, the early Romans thought the worst possible disgrace for an army was being made to pass UNDER a YOKE, because the yoke was used on cattle and slave animals, and it showed that someone was above you, so therefore, Early Republican Romans MUST have thought up was better than down!"

At this point, I would like to point that the English "yoke", the Latin "iugulum", and perhaps shockingly, the word "yoga", all derive from the same Proto-Indo-European stem, *yeug- "to join". And for all the posturing in India about a 5,000 year culture, the practice of yoga, of "yoking oneself" to the divine, isn't written down until... well about 500 BCE, so it's another Axial Age concept! See, this whole idea is not just about archaeology, or philosophy of mind, or history of ideas, but really about biology and etymology, and how human language and consciousness were born out of trying to create language using only primal absolutes.

So, in a way, trying to push such a high-level examination of the whole concept of lateralization preference is kind of my own thing. This is NOT to say that there aren't a million people working at different chunks of the problem. Hell, everyone "knows" about the two hemispheres of the brain. We have great science being done on what's called the "laterality-valence hypothesis", where mammal experiments show that the right hemisphere may be more responsible for retreating, negative, withdrawal reactions, and the left hemisphere more responsible for governing "positive", approaching interactions. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-015-0928-3

And yes, this encoding of "left hand - GROSS, BACK OFF" and "right hand - OK, MOVE FORWARD" can be connected to the origin of civilization. There's a current thesis in anthropology and moral psychology that the main emotion motivating the origin of civilization was not LOVE, but DISGUST. Here, you can read all about that, and try to keep in mind that there's a clinically-demonstrated, biologically-rooted lateralization of left/right, forward/back reactions that MIGHT inform which emotions we express to create culture.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-disgust-made-humans-cooperate-to-build-civilisations


This opens a gigantic hypothetical can of worms. If I WERE to recommend a book, it would be an outdated, speculative, and controversial one, that still has had a lot of impact: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Reading his work first put me on this path. His hypothesis is radical: the evolution of the human interface with lateralization can be seen as a developing process from the earliest cultural artifacts and writing, and his contention is that we can observe, just in these past five-thousand years, the actual origin of modern consciousness from a previous, more biologically-fundamental version.

Yeah, it's nuts. It provides a functional explanation why people thousands of years ago ACTUALLY DID interact with gods, angels, and divinities, and bases it all not on mysticism, but biology and culture. Jaynes points out that all of our standard speech areas, Wernicke's area, Broca's area, and the supplemental motor area, are all left-lateralized (and therefore associated with right-side dominance in handedness and eye preference). Why would such a critical function be put on only one side of the brain instead of both? He hypothesizes that there is a set of vestigial RIGHT-hemispheric speech centers, which generated internal voices of commands, and claimed that when schizophrenics heard commanding voices, that this ancient speech center lit up and sent information across the anterior commissures, literally bringing the commands of the gods over into what would BECOME the modern identity or consciousness. In other words, what made the ancient god-king societies function was a very prevalent mass schizophrenia, where the imposing ziggurats and monuments induced a kind of hive-minded, mass hallucination that allowed humanity to transition from living in small groups to large, and eventually to abandoning or losing the voices of the gods as they evolved what we call modern consciousness, all VEEERRRYY recently.

Yeah, I know. I have to post a giant study from Oxford about how schizophrenia is a lateralization dysfunction to take the curse off that craziness! http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/128/5/963

Seriously, you put a schizophrenic into an fMRI while they are hearing voices of command, and the mirrored, forgotten parallels to our modern speech centers light up like a god drat Christmas tree. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4273663/

So, I'm not crazy, and I don't think Jaynes was either. The basic proposal is that the earliest civilizations we know were not fully conscious like we were; instead, they had a predilection for much more balanced brain activity: the left-hemispheric mind did all the rote, standard, daily-living work of tool use, work, language, and routine analysis. Meanwhile, if something REALLY crazy or stressful happened, which was pretty much all the time, the RIGHT brain would kick in, speak in a divine, commanding voice, perhaps even create a visual hallucination of a relative, friend, or god touching or commanding you, and would give you the solution to implement to relieve the stress. poo poo, Jaynes does an in-depth reading of the Iliad, and shows that the "humans" of that time didn't think in a modern way AT ALL. They didn't have a centralized sense of identity or body holism, instead thinking of people as a collection of parts, but more than anything, he claims that nobody in the Iliad makes a personal choice or is able to LIE in stressful decisions. Seriously, every time Achilles or Agamemnon get stressed about what to do about Briseis, a motherfucking deity reaches in and tells them what to do. And the other motherfuckers ACCEPT THIS AS A VALID EXPLANATION.

Why all this rambling? When you ask questions about which side we prefer, whether we like up or down, or forward or back, you're asking a question that goes all the way down into really fine biology, and is expressed in every level all the way up to the most abstract language and concepts. I taught history, classics, and Latin for 15 years. My general proposal to my students was that the minds of people from other times and places are more radically different than ours than they are the same, and that if we develop a nose for sniffing out those differences, we begin to get to a REAL understanding, not just of them, but of ourselves. The more distant the perspective and deep the understanding of difference, the greater the leverage you have to move your world.

History!

EDIT: Well, this link has been up for years, so I GUESS it's of some valid copyright state, but if not, I'm sure a mod will remove it. Here's the Jaynes book. Enjoy: http://selfdefinition.org/psychology/Julian-Jaynes-Origin-of-Consciousness-Breakdown-of-Bicameral-Mind.pdf

Hogge Wild posted:

bicameralism is utter bullshit

Quidam Viator posted:

HEYYYYY that's the SA experience I'm used to! Thanks for makin me feel at home, pardner.

MisterBibs posted:

Request (or, more specifically, a request to see if this actually happened or if the story I read was apocryphal:

I recall reading a story about some feudalism-era (I think?) painter who, as was the style at the time, drew women in their "ideal" state: plump and hairless. Did a ton of them. When he got married, however, he freaked out on his wedding night because he was suddenly faced with an actual woman who wasn't plump and had hair down there. As this half-remembered story goes, he immediately flees the scene, gets a divorce, and becomes a monk/priest/whatever for the rest of his life.

I've tried googling this off and on for a long time to no avail, so I'm inclined to think it's bullshit, but it almost kinda makes sense.

Quidam Viator posted:

Hogge Wild posted:

bicameralism is utter bullshit

Quidam Viator posted:

Evolution does not just throw away its foundations. It should be clear that to whatever extent a human being living in modern, Western, "rationally conscious" culture believes in mystical things such as, but not limited to witchcraft, possession, angels, devils, demons, ghosts, gods, and magic, is the extent to which that individual has drunk from the same well as the Ndembu.

...

I tend to follow this idea of a progression from Edenic, animal humanity to a crisis which demanded bicameral, bilateralized thinking, to another crisis which created a series of breakdowns in the bicameral mind, which leads us to our modern, heterogeneous mental condition.

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

I have heard this story too! I think it's the guy who painted a bunch of english ladies with bulbous eggy heads. I think it's at least documented that Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette's husband, had never seen female genitalia before marrying her and found it horrifying.

Decrepus posted:

They don't put pubes on sculptures.

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

Samovar posted:

Werewolf!

Samovar posted:

Werewolf!

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

They might have painted them on though. A lot of classical statues were really colorful originally, and probably much more detailed than our reconstructions can show



I believe the analysis we use to recreate painted statues can only show the bottom layer of color, so we shouldn't assume they painted everything flat.

Rutibex posted:

I always wondered why they would go to all the trouble of carving an intricate marble statue, only to paint it like the mass produced Ronald McDonalds you see outside of restaurants.

Rutibex posted:

I always wondered why they would go to all the trouble of carving an intricate marble statue, only to paint it like the mass produced Ronald McDonalds you see outside of restaurants. If you are going to paint them so gaudy you may as well make them out of molded concrete. Did Romans every make concrete statues?

MisterBibs posted:

Request (or, more specifically, a request to see if this actually happened or if the story I read was apocryphal:

I recall reading a story about some feudalism-era (I think?) painter who, as was the style at the time, drew women in their "ideal" state: plump and hairless. Did a ton of them. When he got married, however, he freaked out on his wedding night because he was suddenly faced with an actual woman who wasn't plump and had hair down there. As this half-remembered story goes, he immediately flees the scene, gets a divorce, and becomes a monk/priest/whatever for the rest of his life.

I've tried googling this off and on for a long time to no avail, so I'm inclined to think it's bullshit, but it almost kinda makes sense.

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

I have heard this story too! I think it's the guy who painted a bunch of english ladies with bulbous eggy heads. I think it's at least documented that Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette's husband, had never seen female genitalia before marrying her and found it horrifying.

Slime posted:

Maybe they didn't seem gaudy to the romans, since they didn't have poo poo like mcdonalds to associated those colour schemes with.

Rutibex posted:

I always wondered why they would go to all the trouble of carving an intricate marble statue, only to paint it like the mass produced Ronald McDonalds you see outside of restaurants. If you are going to paint them so gaudy you may as well make them out of molded concrete. Did Romans every make concrete statues?

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

They might have painted them on though. A lot of classical statues were really colorful originally, and probably much more detailed than our reconstructions can show



I believe the analysis we use to recreate painted statues can only show the bottom layer of color, so we shouldn't assume they painted everything flat. There are definitely classical examples of painting that's just as masterful as the renaissance

Carbon dioxide posted:

Serious question: I read about theory/hypothesis that's as follows: ancient humans tried to understand animals on more than an instinctive level - they tried to understand what the animals were thinking.

achillesforever6 posted:

Wonder how expensive it used to be to paint in ancient times to get some really vivid colors; I know purple and blue were probably the most expensive colors to make.

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

I learned reading Bill Bryson's excellent At Home: A Short History of Private Life that good black paint wasn't available until the late industrial age. All those period pictures with Victorians walking around in front of black-painted iron railings? All wrong! Might as well have cavemen riding dinosaurs in the background.

Cumslut1895 posted:

Wouldn't they be naturally black wrought iron?

Gato posted:

Pretty sure you're thinking of John Ruskin, the enormously influential 19th-century British art critic. His marriage was annulled because of non-consummation, and the rumour went round that he'd spent so much time looking at Classical depictions of the female form he wasn't prepared for the existence of pubic hair. He definitely had some odd complex where his wife (and possibly women in general) were concerned, but there's no direct evidence for the pubes thing, and the fact that she was having a fairly public affair with the painter John Millais probably didn't help.

Decrepus posted:

They don't put pubes on sculptures.

HEY GAL posted:

odysseus lied all the time

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

I learned reading Bill Bryson's excellent At Home: A Short History of Private Life that good black paint wasn't available until the late industrial age. All those period pictures with Victorians walking around in front of black-painted iron railings? All wrong! Might as well have cavemen riding dinosaurs in the background.

Rutibex posted:

Than what the heck was Caravaggio painting with in the 17th century?