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SlothfulCobra posted:I got the impression from Thucydides that the Athenian politics were really capricious, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was just that the second a popular person left the city some bumblefuck started plotting against them so they'd get screwed the second they returned with anything less than stellar success, out comes the mob to toss 'em out. There's a reason why most modern governments would rather harken to the Roman Republic than to Athenian Democracy.  PS: Mike Duncan would like you to buy his book.
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Sep 5, 2017 16:52
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Guildencrantz posted:Speaking of which, at what point did the European attitude towards cats shift, and do we have any information on how it happenrd?
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Sep 5, 2017 17:07
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) so clearly their reputation was in the toilet at that point.
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Angry Salami posted:When did cats become commonplace in Greece and Rome? I know cats were still seen as a bit of an exotic novelty early on, but I just can't imagine Rome or Constantinople without the cats everywhere. So when did they go from being 'this weird critter I got in Egypt' to 'yeah, there's stray moggies in the forum, in the temples, in the Hagia Sophia, so what?' Forever, cats are native creatures.  On this map, the light purple represents specifically the former native range of the European subspecies of the wildcat, while dark purple is their current range - they have been deliberately driven out of much of the rest by humans, or interbred so much with domesticated cats as to no longer be distinct in the wild. Domestic cats are felis silvestris catus and mostly derive from felis silvestris lybica Keep in mind that you can't just grab some random roper wildcat out of the forest and desert and expect to have a new best friend. They are quite ferocious and wild little creatures and they will gently caress you up if you mess with them. Proper domestication had to take quite a lot of time even after you had the partial use/tolerance of cats to accompany a hunt or to keep down the rodents around your grain. Ras Het posted:Cats are like #1 most destructive invasive species in the world and we need to stop liking them You can hardly call cats an invasive species in the vast majority of Europe, Western-Central Asia, and Africa, where wildcats were endemic for hundreds of thousands of years and where the common domestic cats of today are from (particularly from the Northern Africa/Western Asia subspecies, but there's also a lot of intermixture of the European subspecies.) fishmech fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Sep 5, 2017 |
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Sep 5, 2017 17:10
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sullat posted:From the point of view of a Sumerian granary worker or a modern farmer, this is a feature, not a bug. It did freak out medieval intellectuals, though. One of the things you see running though medieval intellectual thought and reflected in bestiaries and stuff is that animals were created by God with a dual purpose....first to live and thrive in their own right, but second, to serve as moral exemplars and lessons to people. So, for instance, the lion symbolizes pride, the ant and bee diligence, the hyena sexual depravity, and so on. In a lot of bestiaries, the cat symbolizes sadism, and the cat playing with its prey analogizes to Satan tormenting the souls of the damned.
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Sep 5, 2017 17:56
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fishmech posted:You can hardly call cats an invasive species in the vast majority of Europe, Western-Central Asia, and Africa, where wildcats were endemic for hundreds of thousands of years and where the common domestic cats of today are from (particularly from the Northern Africa/Western Asia subspecies, but there's also a lot of intermixture of the European subspecies.) They are in the Americas. Coincidentally, most of those articles about murderous cats, and the pie graph from FAUXTON's post all come from US institutions.
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Sep 5, 2017 17:57
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I mean they still do that in Europe too, you should keep your cats indoors.
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Sep 5, 2017 17:58
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Not to mention pretty much all the island ecosystems they gently caress up. Or the fact that humans allow them to have much higher population densities then they normally would.
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Sep 5, 2017 18:06
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Possible evidence of stone age people in brazil 20 000 years ago People hunted giant sloths in the center of South America around 23,120 years ago, researchers say — a find that adds to evidence that humans reached South America well before Clovis hunters roamed North America roughly 13,000 years ago. Evidence of people’s presence at Santa Elina rock shelter, located in a forested part of eastern Brazil, so long ago raises questions about how people first entered South America. Early settlers may have floated down the Pacific Coast in canoes before heading 2,000 kilometers east to the remote rock shelter, or they might have taken an inland route from North America, archaeologist Denis Vialou of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and his colleagues report in the August Antiquity. Other South American sites reportedly occupied by Stone Age humans lie much closer to the coast than Santa Elina does. Excavations at Santa Elina from 1984 to 2004 revealed three sediment layers containing numerous stone artifacts and bones of giant sloths called Glossotherium. Sloth remains included small, bony plates from the skin that humans made into ornaments of some kind by adding notches and holes. Sediment layers also contained remains of hearths. Three dating methods, applied to charcoal particles, sediment and sloth bones, indicate that people first reached Santa Elina more than 20,000 years ago. Humans again visited the rock shelter from around 10,120 to 2,000 years ago, the researchers say.
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Sep 7, 2017 00:54
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Epicurius posted:It did freak out medieval intellectuals, though. One of the things you see running though medieval intellectual thought and reflected in bestiaries and stuff is that animals were created by God with a dual purpose....first to live and thrive in their own right, but second, to serve as moral exemplars and lessons to people. So, for instance, the lion symbolizes pride, the ant and bee diligence, the hyena sexual depravity, and so on. In a lot of bestiaries, the cat symbolizes sadism, and the cat playing with its prey analogizes to Satan tormenting the souls of the damned. For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery. e. For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance. For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying. CommonShore fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Sep 7, 2017 |
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Sep 7, 2017 03:58
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Guildencrantz posted:So, do we have any theories on how this change came about? With this kind of thing I don't think there's necessarily going to be any coherent reason. Sometimes a group of people just need a scapegoat for bad luck or plague or w/e. Best to pick a scapegoat that you can reliably expect to find around your homes, otherwise its hard to blame. I mean I'm sure Zoroastrians have some perfectly coherent reason for why they think hedgehogs are so evil, but like it's still going to be completely arbitrary. Burmese Kings had six traditional enemies: the bird, the pig, the ogre, the tiger, the gourd, and the flying squirrel. I'm sure it makes sense in context but you have to wonder what exactly they had against gourds. I had a friend wonder why salt is used in magical rituals across so many disparate cultures. I'm mean maybe salt really does form an impenetrable barrier to demons. . . OR maybe salt was a reasonably affordable and widely available commodity that naturally lent itself to use for that purpose.
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Sep 7, 2017 04:49
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Squalid posted:I had a friend wonder why salt is used in magical rituals across so many disparate cultures. I'm mean maybe salt really does form an impenetrable barrier to demons. . . OR maybe salt was a reasonably affordable and widely available commodity that naturally lent itself to use for that purpose. Was it common to all cultures or just indo-european ones? My only source is wikipedia because I'm an awful scholar, but the only non-indo culture mentioned is the Aztecs. I seem to remember Mansa Musa bringing a bunch of salt with him when he did the hajj, but afaik that was more for trade value than spiritual significance. As usual, this is me trying to post something wrong and get corrected so if you know better please tell me how wrong this is.
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Sep 7, 2017 05:50
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Salt being valuable but expendable (you are supposed to eat it after all) probably contributed to its use in those situations
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Sep 7, 2017 05:52
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Boring Latin question (only tangentially related to the thread, admittedly): there is the phrase "fiat justitia ruat caelum" for let justice be done though the heavens fall; along the same lines, how would you translate the phrase "let the truth be known though the heavens fall" back into Latin? Great thread by the way, I've learned a lot reading it over the years. Particularly the bits about Roman medical techniques!
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Sep 7, 2017 05:53
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Was it common to all cultures or just indo-european ones? My only source is wikipedia because I'm an awful scholar, but the only non-indo culture mentioned is the Aztecs. I seem to remember Mansa Musa bringing a bunch of salt with him when he did the hajj, but afaik that was more for trade value than spiritual significance. Japan used it traditionally, unless anime has lied to me. And anime would never lie! 
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Sep 7, 2017 06:01
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Squalid posted:Japan used it traditionally, unless anime has lied to me. And anime would never lie! I thought they were more about fresh, white paper than salt, but I that's based on a 1970s issue of National Geographic or possibly a fever dream, which may or may not be more reliable than anime.
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Sep 7, 2017 06:08
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Squalid posted:Japan used it traditionally, unless anime has lied to me. And anime would never lie! When I was growing up, grandma told me that if I didn't have salt under my bed I would be murdered by ghosts in my sleep, so it was a thing as of her generation.
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Sep 7, 2017 06:15
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I thought they were more about fresh, white paper than salt, but I that's based on a 1970s issue of National Geographic or possibly a fever dream, which may or may not be more reliable than anime. They sure weren't using fresh paper in quantity for that until paper actually arrived. Anyway most cultures will learn that salt makes food ok to eat much longer. That natural sort of use of preservation, it would be easy to see that said culture starts thinking maybe this protects other things.
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Sep 7, 2017 06:23
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Will Rice posted:Boring Latin question (only tangentially related to the thread, admittedly): there is the phrase "fiat justitia ruat caelum" for let justice be done though the heavens fall; along the same lines, how would you translate the phrase "let the truth be known though the heavens fall" back into Latin? I'd go with sciatur veritas et ruat caelum, but Latin isn't 1:1 code for English, so somebody who's invested in prosody can do better.
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Sep 7, 2017 14:24
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As an alternative, reveletur veritas ruat caelum would be "Let the truth be revealed though the heavens fall".
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Sep 7, 2017 18:12
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Thank you both!
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Sep 8, 2017 16:48
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...t-a7916346.html This article says they've used new analytic techniques to see things that were originally written on parchments that were later overwritten by the Bible. Pretty neat if it's not some sort of exaggeration.
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Sep 8, 2017 22:39
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Elyv posted:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...t-a7916346.html I hope it's a copy of Famous Whores.
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Sep 9, 2017 01:58
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Elyv posted:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...t-a7916346.html Sounds entirely plausible. Reading stuff off palimpsests has been a thing for a long time, it's mentioned in Sherlock Holmes I think - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest
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Sep 9, 2017 11:21
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Unearthed near Hadrian’s Wall: lost secrets of first Roman soldiers to fight the Picts quote:Archaeologists stumbled on the site by chance and have been taken aback by finds in a remarkable state of preservation. These include two extremely rare cavalry swords – one of them complete, still with its wooden scabbard, hilt and pommel – and two wooden toy swords. One has a gemstone in its pommel.  
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Sep 9, 2017 22:50
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Is that gold? Or bronze?
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Sep 10, 2017 02:38
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I would guess brass. The article mentions shiny, uncorroded copper alloys.
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Sep 10, 2017 02:42
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Whatever it is it's spectacular . 2000 years in the mud and it looks new.
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Sep 10, 2017 02:46
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I would have guessed gold given how bright it is, I dunno what else wouldn't rust at all. Even brass tarnishes.
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Sep 10, 2017 03:33
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Given that they recovered wood and textiles I'm guessing some crazy anaerobic environment. Given that low corrosion on metal isn't too unlikely.
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Sep 10, 2017 04:39
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OwlFancier posted:I would have guessed gold given how bright it is, I dunno what else wouldn't rust at all. Even brass tarnishes. Cyrano4747 posted:some crazy anaerobic environment.
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Sep 10, 2017 14:57
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HEY GAIL posted:It is tarnished, on the chain links. See also those bogs in the baltics that people are pulling WW2 era tanks and poo poo out of that have paint jobs that look like they were put on yesterday.
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Sep 10, 2017 16:22
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Cyrano4747 posted:See also those bogs in the baltics that people are pulling WW2 era tanks and poo poo out of that have paint jobs that look like they were put on yesterday. one nation under bog
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Sep 10, 2017 16:32
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HEY GAIL posted:one nation under bog When I die I want someone to feed me into a bog wrapped in 16th century linens holding an iPad in one hand and a medieval crucifix in the other. At my feet will be copies of Turtledove's ACW books, rebound and labeled "A History of the North American Wars, 1865-1950" Just troll the gently caress out of future archeologists.
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Sep 10, 2017 17:11
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HEY GAIL posted:It is tarnished, on the chain links. I thought that was just bits of mud.
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Sep 10, 2017 17:16
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Cyrano4747 posted:When I die I want someone to feed me into a bog wrapped in 16th century linens holding an iPad in one hand and a medieval crucifix in the other. At my feet will be copies of Turtledove's ACW books, rebound and labeled "A History of the North American Wars, 1865-1950" Enough of my colleagues have this as something they have jokingly planned so im pretty sure the future archaeologist will go "oh great we got another joker here" . Also if that happened we would just date you to the range of the easiest and most latish date possible which we would likely do by looking up the production years for that ipad. Given that other archaeologist will also uncover households with other items from a wide variety of times its not going to be super surprising to them I would wager. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Sep 10, 2017 |
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Sep 10, 2017 17:21
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Cyrano4747 posted:When I die I want someone to feed me into a bog wrapped in 16th century linens holding an iPad in one hand and a medieval crucifix in the other. At my feet will be copies of Turtledove's ACW books, rebound and labeled "A History of the North American Wars, 1865-1950" Papyrus and nylon weave.
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Sep 10, 2017 17:22
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Telsa Cola posted:Enough of my colleagues have this as something they have jokingly planned so in pretty sure the future archaeologist will go "oh great we got another joker here" . 21st century bog burials: the role of ironic comedy in ancient funerary customs
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Sep 10, 2017 17:23
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I have never really gotten how people would think that the trick would work. While its not my focus I understand similar situations occur with Roman/Egyptian/Greek poo poo and people dont assume they are time travelers or whatever.
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Sep 10, 2017 17:34
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Archeology has been a respectable academic field for at least a century by now, right? How many jokes for future archeologists have already been planted?
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Sep 10, 2017 17:48
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SlothfulCobra posted:Archeology has been a respectable academic field for at least a century by now, right? How many jokes for future archeologists have already been planted? These are less jokes and more very obvious weird poo poo but poo poo does get placed when backfill is done, both as a way to say "Hey this has been dug up to this point" and also as a secondary way to date it when that excavation was done. Lots of old news papers, I think I heard of a letter being placed once. If you do historic NA arch I have seen a poo poo ton of old tins and lunch boxes used as markers which is really neat.
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Sep 10, 2017 17:52
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