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Chopstix posted:God drat what a find, how decadent is that for that period, let alone today. “Here look at this solid gold vase I have”. Give it a cheap coat of paint to hide your wealth in plain sight.
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Aug 6, 2021 14:55
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That link kid is gonna get the shock of his life.
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Aug 6, 2021 16:18
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The crazy thing is it's not even that intricate. Surely if you can afford that much gold you can afford to shape it into something other than the world's most boring vase e: although maybe the point was that the focus was on whatever was in the vase and the vase being simple but showy was the point cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Aug 6, 2021 |
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Aug 6, 2021 19:22
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cheetah7071 posted:The crazy thing is it's not even that intricate. Surely if you can afford that much gold you can afford to shape it into something other than the world's most boring vase Nero had terrible taste
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Aug 6, 2021 20:21
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I’m sure it was some religious relic
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Aug 6, 2021 20:22
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sullat posted:Nero had terrible taste Yeah it just screams crass display to me.
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Aug 6, 2021 20:29
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Gold's iirc actually good for utensils and food storage since it's sterile and easy to clean.Crab Dad posted:Give it a cheap coat of paint to hide your wealth in plain sight. Came up a while back but not even that long ago an unspoken reason for women to have expensive jewellery was basically an emergency store of cash in case they need to get out quick, and wouldn't be surprised if that's been a principle for a long time; a wealthy family's jewellery, furnishings and such were stores of wealth in themselves.
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Aug 7, 2021 05:59
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More usefully, it's nonreactive, so it won't leave a taste behind on any food. Professional ice cream tasters in the modern day use gold spoons.
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Aug 7, 2021 06:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:More usefully, it's nonreactive, so it won't leave a taste behind on any food. Professional ice cream tasters in the modern day use gold spoons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbepN4dKLbU
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Aug 7, 2021 06:30
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Gold's iirc actually good for utensils and food storage since it's sterile and easy to clean. I've read that's a main reason behind the crown jewels being important, they provided a source of value for a monarch to pawn.
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Aug 7, 2021 06:41
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Gold's iirc actually good for utensils and food storage since it's sterile and easy to clean. Hell I've heard this said about pimps in that you're not getting your bank roll back if you get jailed but you'll get your jewelry (sometimes)
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Aug 7, 2021 09:29
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you can hear the post before you click on it for content: was their alot written about the early west african good trade? Is there a definite date we can say trade began across the Sahara or no one really knows?
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Aug 7, 2021 11:16
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Carillon posted:I've read that's a main reason behind the crown jewels being important, they provided a source of value for a monarch to pawn. I read a book once that traced the history of the Regent diamond... They really did just pawn those things off whenever they needed an army. And then whoever got it would immediately make it a smaller, more fashionable cut in a different setting. It was supposedly 410 carats upon discovery and made it to the current day 140.64 carats. That's an incredible amount of stored wealth, to the point where having the thing seemed more like a loving curse if you didn't hot potato it for some fast cash
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Aug 7, 2021 14:14
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CommonShore posted:I always figured that the mystical protection from bullets stuff had help from survivorship bias. This guy, General Butt Naked, a Liberian warlord, cannibal, leader of child soldiers, etc would fight naked with shoes on. He believed the nakedness protected him from bullets, well that and a ritual human sacrifice before the battle. The survivorship bias was strong enough that child soldiers under his command would emulate it and fight naked themselves. He did this successfully for years until the civil war was coming to an end and he was born again as a Christian preacher, today he is known as Joshua Milton Blahyi and is on social media. He is popular in some circles as a symbol of the forgiveness of Christ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Butt_Naked Brendan Rodgers fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Aug 7, 2021 |
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Aug 7, 2021 15:34
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Brendan Rodgers posted:This guy, General Butt Naked, a Liberian warlord, cannibal, leader of child soldiers, etc would fight naked with shoes on. He believed the nakedness protected him from bullets, well that and a ritual human sacrifice before the battle. The survivorship bias was strong enough that child soldiers under his command would emulate it and fight naked themselves. I can't find the source right now, but I remember reading an article about a similar phenomenon in an African village (can't recall which country) that was often the target of raids from regional warlords. Generally the villager's response was to attempt to run and hide whenever a raid came, but they still suffered severely under them. At some point the spiritual leaders started passing out protective charms to the village militia. These charms would protect the wearer from bullets, but also came with a number of conditions: The wearer couldn't show their backs to the enemy, they can't have had sex with a menstruating woman recently, all sorts of things. Using these charms they tried to mount a resistance, and as you'd expect things went rather poorly for them in the beginning. But those conditions allowed for an easy explanation: If somebody did get shot despite wearing one, clearly they must've done something to nullify its protection. Now, the remarkable thing was that researchers found that the more use these charms saw, the fewer people in the village died during raids. Of course, there's a perfectly mundane explanation: The more confident the militia was in their protection, the more effective the defense they would mount, fighting back rather than fleeing, and a more effective defense leads to fewer casualties. But there is, in a roundabout way, a causal relationship between these charms and fewer people dying.
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Aug 8, 2021 11:15
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Brendan Rodgers posted:This guy, General Butt Naked, a Liberian warlord, cannibal, leader of child soldiers, etc would fight naked with shoes on. He believed the nakedness protected him from bullets, well that and a ritual human sacrifice before the battle. The survivorship bias was strong enough that child soldiers under his command would emulate it and fight naked themselves.
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Aug 8, 2021 19:40
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Unlike the satanists, those events took place in a backdrop of actual warfare and atrocities and use of child soldiers. Some of the ritualism was probably there, but the child sacrifice does sound absurd. Who the gently caress knows. What I do know is when the next wave of violence hits this man will immediately go back to his old self and perform a new set of atrocities. But this time it will be in the name of God.
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Aug 9, 2021 01:01
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If this is caused by survivorship bias then I'd love to know how many naked satanists tried raising a bulletproof cult unsuccessfully.
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Aug 9, 2021 08:42
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none satanists are fake they're just annoying atheists who want to get a rise out of the squares
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Aug 9, 2021 08:47
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Phobophilia posted:Unlike the satanists, those events took place in a backdrop of actual warfare and atrocities and use of child soldiers. Some of the ritualism was probably there, but the child sacrifice does sound absurd. Who the gently caress knows. Yeah. I've seen the doc, it's pretty ominous how he asks his former victims for forgiveness on his terms with a dominating presence.
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Aug 9, 2021 10:02
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I've been listening to History of Byzantium podcast and started reading Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword that the podcast uses as a reference. Holland makes some big and some could consider wild claims about early history of Islam. I found some of his arguments compelling like that Islam was really codified couple of centuries after Muhammed's time from the interaction between Caliphs using it as a vehicle for their authority and lawyers and scholars trying to limit it. Before that it had a strong Christian or even Jewish character. But some of it seem very wild, like how we don't know the location of original Mecca or how Islam really started closer to Levant. After reading about this, it seems that Holland comes from revisionist tradition so I guess this isn't the optimal place to start about reading about early history of Islam. So what is the threads opinion about this argument?
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Aug 11, 2021 08:25
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Phobophilia posted:none satanists are fake they're just annoying atheists who want to get a rise out of the squares No they're not, can you not tell the difference between dorky teens and a movement with over a million adherents?
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Aug 11, 2021 08:58
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Spider-Man wrote a book about Islam?
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Aug 11, 2021 09:39
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Glah posted:I've been listening to History of Byzantium podcast and started reading Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword that the podcast uses as a reference. Holland makes some big and some could consider wild claims about early history of Islam. I found some of his arguments compelling like that Islam was really codified couple of centuries after Muhammed's time from the interaction between Caliphs using it as a vehicle for their authority and lawyers and scholars trying to limit it. Before that it had a strong Christian or even Jewish character. But some of it seem very wild, like how we don't know the location of original Mecca or how Islam really started closer to Levant. It’s just a place where not a lot of scholarship exists. Partly because the traditional account of the rise of Islam is so ingrained. But also because it looks real bad for a white Westerner to come into another culture and go all “but actually!” on their history, culture, and religion. The dearth of primary sources makes any revisionist analysis incredibly difficult. Could Holland be right about the early aspects/character of Islam? Maybe. But without more archeology, historiography, and primary source work, it’s just partially educated conjecture. Personally, I’d love to see more scholarship on the topic. I do think Holland goes too far and wide with his analysis though.
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Aug 11, 2021 13:11
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is Barbarians on Netflix worth a watch?
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Aug 11, 2021 13:26
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Yes, there some cool parts, and the history they get wrong they get wrong for relatively obvious tv show reasons and it does not really trample the actual history. They insert drama into the parts where there is no concrete historical account and use that to change motivations and such without changing the core event.
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Aug 11, 2021 13:32
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Thwomp posted:But also because it looks real bad for a white Westerner to come into another culture and go all “but actually!” on their history, culture, and religion. That's very recent. Like, that sort of behavior was the norm and something you could be proud of until pretty recently, and is specifically what Edward Said is critiquing in Orientalism. The deeper issue is that, to my knowledge (as somebody who does not specialize in this area, I just knew some people who did in grad school), there aren't enough primary sources that contradict the traditional narrative to create a sound alternative. Looking up historians' reactions to Holland's work on early Islam, the positive reviews highlight good prose and the negatives highlight misuse of sources and unsupported novel claims, which I tend to take as a sign that the work is skillfully made but not historically accurate. Though again I am sure that somebody on these forums knows enough about the era to critique the claims more directly than just "I dunno I'm lookin at smarter people and they think it doesn't work."
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Aug 11, 2021 13:45
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Alan Smithee posted:is Barbarians on Netflix worth a watch? Fun show overall. The setup is good but the payoff doesn’t really make any sense
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Aug 11, 2021 13:52
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I imagine a big problem with the history of Islam is most of the available primary sources and relevant material isn't in English.
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Aug 11, 2021 14:02
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Thwomp posted:It’s just a place where not a lot of scholarship exists. Partly because the traditional account of the rise of Islam is so ingrained. This isn't anything to do with Holland per se, but there was a fascinating video posted in this thread a while back delving into whether the city we know today as Mecca is the city referred to in the Quran as Mecca. It's not, the ruined city of Petra is. The historian presenting the video drew on descriptions of Mecca from the Quran, which don't line up with the city known as Mecca today, as well as the construction of the oldest mosques still standing, of which there are enough to triangulate where they originally pointed, and also offers a plausible explanation for when and how the shift occurred, during an early Islamic civil war. I don't remember the exact dates, sometime in the 700s I believe? It seemed to paint a very clear and believable picture. I didn't get any sense of anti-Islam sentiment from the video, for what that's worth.
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Aug 11, 2021 14:05
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Alan Smithee posted:is Barbarians on Netflix worth a watch? It's fine (the battles are not fine imo), but watch Norsemen first
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Aug 11, 2021 14:57
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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One of Byzantium and Friends's most recent interviews (ep 52-53-54 something like that) is with Sean William Anthony, author of Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam, and they discuss the challenges of the history and philology of the first centuries of Islam. I listened to it yesterday and it's great. The book is also available cheap if you know where to look. Several of the points that you bring up come up in the discussion, and it sounds like buddy has smeared some of the facts. This is all from recollection, but here goes: 1) It's not that "we don't know where Mecca was" but rather that Mecca's first entry in the historical record is its appearance in early Islamic texts. 2) There is a philological tradition which contends that the Quran was unstable for like 2 centuries but Anthony cites plenty of evidence to the contrary. 3) There isn't a lot of early historical evidence internal to the Islamic traditions about its shape and traditions at that time (it's all generationally removed oral tradition) but there is quite a bit of material produced about it from non-Muslim sources. Give it a listen.
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Aug 11, 2021 15:08
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PittTheElder posted:It's fine (the battles are not fine imo), but watch Norsemen first There's something about Norsemen's comedy that feels strangely authentic to me, like the people of that world feel more historic than the hollywood style portrayals. 
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Aug 11, 2021 15:12
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Question that I haven't seen yet: What options did nearsighted people have in ancient times? I remember reading or hearing somewhere that the Romans used the nickname "Strabo" to refer to people as blind, but I interpreted that to mean "their eyes suck," not actually without sight. And to shitpost: Isn't the best name for the Eastern Roman Empire actually the Holy Roman Empire?
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Aug 11, 2021 17:56
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Well Played Mauer posted:And to shitpost: Isn't the best name for the Eastern Roman Empire actually the Holy Roman Empire? Serious answer: probably not. The theocratic nature of the ERE is hella exaggerated in the western consciousness.
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Aug 11, 2021 18:41
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Well Played Mauer posted:Question that I haven't seen yet: What options did nearsighted people have in ancient times? I remember reading or hearing somewhere that the Romans used the nickname "Strabo" to refer to people as blind, but I interpreted that to mean "their eyes suck," not actually without sight. There were a lot fewer of them because myopia is largely environmental. Blue light expsoure regulates growth in the eye, and lack of it results in the eye's focus being wrong. Not only are there great matches between lack of sunlight exposure and nearsightness in humans, but this has been replicated in animal experiments as well (sticking a tinted monocle on a guineapig's eye). TL;DR: Your mom was right, if you don't go outside and play you will grow up needing glasses.
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Aug 11, 2021 19:52
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Joke's on her, I got my blue light from being kept awake by the computer monitor whilst endlessly posting. 
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Aug 11, 2021 19:57
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Well Played Mauer posted:Question that I haven't seen yet: What options did nearsighted people have in ancient times? I remember reading or hearing somewhere that the Romans used the nickname "Strabo" to refer to people as blind, but I interpreted that to mean "their eyes suck," not actually without sight. Blind is not strabo but caecus (also an acceptable nickname, the famous republican leader Appius Claudius was known as Caecus). Strabo is more like “squinty, cross-eyed, wall-eyed”, less a comment on the quality of the person’s vision than on the fact that they looked weird to others. Though squinting can be caused by nearsightedness of course, and might have been about as good a solution as was available. Educated people in antiquity were aware of the concept of a magnifying glass, but I don’t know of any evidence that they used corrective lenses.
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Aug 11, 2021 20:00
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And yeah glasses weren't a thing until the middle ages. Roman glassmaking was good enough they could've made them, but nobody thought of it. They did have magnifying lenses, they're mentioned in a few sources.
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Aug 11, 2021 20:07
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Did they have the understanding of the math behind lenses down well enough to design a pair of glasses? I assume you need a lot more knowledge of lens mechanics to make a properly functioning pair of corrective glasses than a magnifying glass. But maybe I'm wrong.
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Aug 11, 2021 20:11
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