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CrypticFox posted:I imagine those missionaries more probably would have come from Sassanian lands rather than the Roman Empire. The Church of the East (Nestorians) was much bigger in Sassanian lands than it was Roman lands, and Iraq/Iran is a lot closer to China than the Roman empire. Really, they could even have come from Central Asia, since the Church of the East had a very big presence in Central Asia until around the 14th century. No reason the mission to China has to have been a long distance endeavor, there were a lot of Church of the East Christians not that far from China quite early on. Fair points. My other circumstantial evidence is the story about the theft of the silkworms. It feels apocryphal, but I think the fact that the story went around and was evidently plausible enough people told it and we still have it suggests that the idea of Nestorian monks going to China and back was enough of a thing it passed the sniff test. And of course, the Romans did evidently get their hands on silkworm technology so something must've happened. Would be nice to find some Latin inscriptions in China though.
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Sep 27, 2023 21:54
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You're telling me a Trojan fried this horse?
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Sep 27, 2023 21:58
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Arglebargle III posted:You're telling me a horse fried these Trojans?
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Sep 27, 2023 22:02
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Snorri was writing the history of the kings of Norway, who had long traced their lineage back to Odin, and by claiming that the Æsir actually existed but weren't actually gods but mystical foreigners who were just so amazing that later people thought they were gods it allowed to kings of Norway to keep doing tracing their line back to Odin without it being overly pagan.
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Sep 28, 2023 02:14
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Judgy Fucker posted:Well, that's because the Gospels don't explain the context of why they were exchanging coins and selling doves and other animals in the Temple. Edgar Allan Ho is correct, the Temple had not become a shopping mall, people were selling animals to sacrifice during Passover because Jews from all across Judaea and further afield--who could not feasibly bring animals with them to Jerusalem--needed animals to sacrifice. And, as EAH said, it was blasphemous to use Roman coinage, so they had moneychangers to exchange Roman coins for acceptable Jewish ones. For a fee, of course. So Jesus was mad that people were profiting within and because of the Temple cult, but it wasn't like people were heading up to the Temple to buy new drip. However the last temptation of Christ does get into this
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Sep 28, 2023 05:16
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FreudianSlippers posted:Snorri was writing the history of the kings of Norway, who had long traced their lineage back to Odin, and by claiming that the Æsir actually existed but weren't actually gods but mystical foreigners who were just so amazing that later people thought they were gods it allowed to kings of Norway to keep doing tracing their line back to Odin without it being overly pagan. Aliens are a kind of mystical foreigner...
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Sep 28, 2023 06:22
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Having taken up stargazing the past few years of working outside at night- it’s amazing how instantly you pick it up. I can name stars and constellations in the sky of places I know and tell directions from them. I can tell what time of year it is too. That’s not a humblebrag- I think everyone would figure it out if it was necessary these days. When that’s critical because there is no gps, and without immense light pollution, well gently caress I’d like to see that I memorized them out of a book in 1997. I still have that book. It comes down to learning your major landmarks like the Big Dipper, learning how to use it and Orion to find other constellations, and beating them into memory. In the thirty years I've had the nickname Star Man, I learned early on how utterly impossible it is to get anyone to look up.
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Sep 28, 2023 07:57
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Gaius Jivius Caesar vs Twerkingetorix
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Sep 30, 2023 17:56
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Sep 30, 2023 18:06
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Sep 30, 2023 23:54
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Bit late to map talk, but wouldn't one of the main differences in how people in the past approached maps compared to today be that any kind of social or political boundary would be far more ephemeral prior to the establishment of the modern state. Outside of hard geographical boundaries like the sea, where one polities authority ended and the next began would be rarely clearly delineated; this is a pretty major difference from how we might interface with maps today. I can't speak to this situation being a constant for all of history, but a good example of this were the various Crusader states established on the coast of the Levant following the First Crusade in the late 11th century. While a modern map will usually present them with rationalised borders the reality was that, especially during periods of more contentious relations with their muslim neighbours, their authority in rural areas was based on where they project military force. As such projection was reliant upon the construction of castles, a process often carried with a fair amount of independence from any central authority, the real boundaries of authority would of been a patchwork mess.
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Oct 1, 2023 11:21
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Oct 1, 2023 23:58
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Roman/ancient history:
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Oct 2, 2023 15:10
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Archaeology! https://www.heritagedaily.com/2023/10/archaeological-mission-finds-hundreds-of-sealed-jars-in-tomb-of-merit-neith/148768 quote:ARCHAEOLOGICAL MISSION FINDS HUNDREDS OF SEALED JARS IN TOMB OF MERIT-NEITH I will be honest that I did not know who Merit-Neith was prior to those articles, and so "first female pharaoh" was a buried lede and immediately became the much more interesting factoid to me. Nevertheless: sealed jars. https://www.arabtimesonline.com/news/a-remarkable-find-tomb-of-queen-merit-neith-ancient-matriarch/ quote:KUWAIT CITY, Oct 2: Dating back to the era of Queen Merit Neith, the first female ruler in human history, 5,000-year-old wine jars were found in southern Egypt (Xinhua) October 1, 2023 02:55 PM 3381 please drink the tomb wine, waziri.
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Oct 3, 2023 02:27
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Sealed jars at Abydos? What out for symbiotes.
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Oct 3, 2023 06:45
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:https://www.arabtimesonline.com/news/a-remarkable-find-tomb-of-queen-merit-neith-ancient-matriarch/ I like how the second story goes right from 'may have been the first female Pharaoh, we dunno' to 'first female ruler in history, worldwide!'
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Oct 3, 2023 11:04
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https://twitter.com/GunjanJS/status/1708902051609002113 So you can see why unscrupulous copper vendors could stay in business, interest rates stifled competing firms.
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Oct 3, 2023 14:22
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Star Man posted:In the thirty years I've had the nickname Star Man, I learned early on how utterly impossible it is to get anyone to look up. So you're telling me the Leonardo DiCaprio/Jennifer Lawrence movie was a documentary.
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Oct 3, 2023 15:36
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I got a question, I don't know if it has an answer but I'm still curious. I'm reading through a bunch of the biblical apocrypha. And I get to the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. It's a Latin medieval text (somewhere between 600 and 800ce I think) that's all goofy and has 2 year old Jesus speaking all fluently and sophisticated it's great. It mentions dragons, as follows. quote:Cumque peruenissent ad speluncam quandam ut quasi sub ea refrigerarent, descendit Maria de iumento et sedit et habebat Iesum in gremio. Erant autem tres pueri et cum Maria una puella iter agentes. Et ecce subito egressi sunt de spelunca dracones multi, quos uidentes pueri exclamauerunt. Tunc dominus cum esset nondum bimulus excussit se et stans in pedibus stetit ante eos. Illi autem dracones adorauerunt eum et cum adorassent eum abierunt. Tunc adimpletum est quod dictum est per psalmographum prophetam dicentem: Laudate dominum de terra dracones et omnes abyssi. Ipse autem dominus Iesus Christus infantulus deambulabat cum eis ut nullum grauaret. Sed Maria et Ioseph dicebant inter se: Melius est ut nos interficiant isti dracones quam infantem laedant. Quibus Iesus ait: Nolite me considerare quia infantulus sum; ego enim semper uir perfectus fui et sum, et necesse est ut omnia genera ferarum mansuescere faciam. quote:When they arrived at a certain cave where they wanted to cool themselves off, Mary came off the donkey and sat down, and held Jesus on her lap. There were three male servants with them on the road, and one female servant with Mary. And behold, suddenly many dragons came out of the cave. When the servants saw them they cried out. Then the Lord, even though he was not yet two years old, roused himself, got to his feet, and stood in front of them. And the dragons worshiped him. When they finished worshiping him, they went away. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet in the Psalms, who said, “Praise the Lord from the earth, O dragons and all the places of the abyss." The Lord Jesus Christ, though just a small child, walked along with them so that he might not be a burden to anyone. Mary and Joseph were saying to one another, “It would be better for those dragons to kill us than to harm the child.” Jesus said to them, “Do not think of me as a young child, for I have always been the perfect man, and am now; and it is necessary for me to tame every kind of wild beast.” So, this is weird to me. I might be giving medieval people too much of the benefit of the doubt, but this book seems to be asking to be taken literally. I would have assumed by then people had realized dragons were mythical? Since no one in the Roman empire for example had ever really seen one first hand I'd imagine. And it's just so bizarre that they're just walking along and like out of just any old cave 3 dragons pop out. I just imagine, if I was in that situation and time and I read that I'd think "I've passed by hundreds of caves, never seen a dragon pop out." So I guess what I'm asking, dragons, or "dracones" like used in the Latin here, what did that actually mean to a medieval person? Did they just believe in it and take it literally? Is it referring to something else? What are the dragons here and why did this author think "yeah dragons that works, right alongside lions and stuff"? Is the author just stretching what's believable hoping people who previously didn't believe in dragons now suddenly consider it for the sake of fulfilling that prophecy? When did people stop literally believing in dragons? What are dragons just generally to medieval people? I think I'm operating on the assumption that all the dragon stuff from the middle ages was symbolic or just known as myth, or from ancient times. Though I'm wondering if I'm wrong.
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Oct 7, 2023 03:47
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I think people genuinely believed in dragons to be honest. People were more well-traveled than we like to imagine, but most people still didn't go THAT far from home. It's easy to imagine that dragons existed somewhere further away than you could ever realistically hope to travel in your life. This might be misremembered on my part, or even pop history, but a lot of mythical creature myths probably stem from people finding fossils.
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Oct 7, 2023 03:54
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It's always hard to say what people actually believed, but it certainly seems like plenty of people did believe dragons were actual animals out in the world somewhere. There are a bunch of discussions of dragons in classical and medieval texts that present them that way.
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Oct 7, 2023 04:01
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Yeah I mean, we know things like lions elephants are real, but they would've been just as mythical as dragons to many European laymen back in the day.
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Oct 7, 2023 04:03
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Jamwad Hilder posted:I think people genuinely believed in dragons to be honest. People were more well-traveled than we like to imagine, but most people still didn't go THAT far from home. It's easy to imagine that dragons existed somewhere further away than you could ever realistically hope to travel in your life. Yeah, there was lots of wilderness with spooky unknown stuff and people would let their imaginations run wild. Some folks ventured out into it and never came back. Lots of legends and lore about what was out there, in part to scare kids into staying close to home. Grimm's fairy tales were all about the terrible things that lurked in the unknown forests full of dangers. Believing in dragons was no more of a reach than believing in lions or giraffes. Almost no one in Europe had seen one personally by the middle ages, but there were reports of them and they had no way to verify their veracity. It's sort of a "I have a friend of a friend whose uncle works at Nintendo and he says his grandfather saw a dragon one time and lived to tell about it."
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Oct 7, 2023 04:06
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BrainDance posted:
I mean people had found fossils and poo poo plus in much more recent times people thought that moose and platypi were mythical. Plus "dragon" as a term has always been very broad, it wasn't like your average medieval peasant was picturing Literally Smaug there have always been tons of different spins on that.
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Oct 7, 2023 04:08
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Yeah from what I gathered reading T.H. Whites' _Bestiary_ I'm not even clear that the medieval mind would have had the same clear division between "real" and "imaginary" entities. Everything is allegorical and part of the Great Chain of Being and foreign lands are filled with unicorns and rhinoceros and lions and phoenix and each creature is a line entry in the Great Book
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Oct 7, 2023 04:10
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Yeah that all makes sense, thanks. This part happened during the flight to Egypt I think, so they're marching through places that the author and probably most of the readers had never been before. That and, I don't know about this one exactly, but a lot of these infancy gospels apparently even get some basic geography wrong so they definitely weren't written where they supposedly happened. edit: Also, strongly recommend reading the infancy gospels. I've been reading the Bible and the apocrypha/books about the bible and apocrypha basically as history (not taking what they say as literal history, what I mean is seeing the books themselves as a product of history, and a way to learn about how people thought then, and just this sorta important process in Western history with the development of the most influential religion in the later part of Rome) The whole thing has been really interesting, there's a lot of political drama and what I can only imagine to be classical neckbeards trying to dunk on each other and say "you're obviously wrong and I'm clearly right" BrainDance fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 7, 2023 04:13
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Important to remember that "basic geography" to us is very much not basic to them. Things we take for granted as common knowledge now are things that only a handful of people may have had a real understanding of then.
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Oct 7, 2023 04:19
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This is a time before zoos or photographs. There are definitely a lot of animals out there, but you have to be extremely well-traveled to see most of them. Even some animals in your local area can be hard to find if you don't have the right circumstances, although I imagine a lot of creatures would've been bolder back in the day, kinda depends on circumstances. There were a lot of creatures humanity was driving extinct, but usually more on purpose rather than then just crushing the environment through the weight of of industrialism. Hard to imagine Europe once being full of lions. Odds are a guy in Scotland would have as little of an idea of a camel as a guy in Egypt would have an idea of a bear. Modern fantasy also likes constructing elaborate supernatural things that are purposefully impossible and otherworldly, while contemporaneously, people didn't really see the same sort of separation. It took a while for the natural sciences to develop to the point where they could stand as something totally separate from superstition, and even then there's plenty of areas where education wouldn't be as strong. We know that some myths and even mythological creatures come from real animals and phenomena, I'm not sure how many. Some explanations of scared superstitious peasants can get pretty patronizing, but it is what it is. My favorite is the cameleopard.
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Oct 7, 2023 05:13
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Important to remember that "basic geography" to us is very much not basic to them. Things we take for granted as common knowledge now are things that only a handful of people may have had a real understanding of then. I'm just remembering when they went around asking a bunch of Americans, right around the time of the invasion, to point out Iraq on a map. Looks like they've repeated that with North Korea, Iran and Ukraine, and every time it averages around 25% of people who can actually get it right. https://www.boredpanda.com/people-asked-point-iran-on-map-joanna-piacenza Anyway I'd be cautious about making assumptions about what constitutes "basic geography" to the modern person.
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Oct 7, 2023 06:07
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This whole thing reminded me, back in college I knew this girl. She was studying to be a nurse so I guess it wasn't something necessary for her to know. Somehow we got talking about dragons and she was like "wait, dragons weren't real?", she had assumed they were a species that had gone extinct in the last 500 or so years. I was young and full of myself so I gave a very condescending "uh no? Dragons were never real... obviously they're mythical" and now I feel really lovely about that  Lead out in cuffs posted:Anyway I'd be cautious about making assumptions about what constitutes "basic geography" to the modern person. In the context of these books, I'd have to look it up but it's one of those situations where one book makes an error, the other books are using it for a source and use the same error I think. Which actually seems like a good thing for dating some of this stuff. The error has something to do with where Judea begins and ends, and some mistake about saying they left for Judea when they were already in Judea or something like that? And, honestly, give me a map and I cant tell you where ancient Judea specifically ends. You could give me all sorts of modern Israeli cities and ask me if they're in Israel or Jordan and I'd probably get it wrong. Though, I'm not writing an apparently divinely inspired book as supposedly a person who had first hand experience of these events leaving or entering Judea. BrainDance fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 7, 2023 06:16
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I'm just remembering when they went around asking a bunch of Americans, right around the time of the invasion, to point out Iraq on a map. Yeah that's kind of my point. If only 25% of people now can get it right, while having access to the entirety of human knowledge via their smart phone, is it that surprising that people in the past made some dumb (to us) mistakes or assumptions about geography?
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Oct 7, 2023 07:05
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A dragon is a beast. Crocodile and bears are beasts. I don’t think it’s much more complicated than that.
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Oct 7, 2023 07:23
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Not to be too pedantic but dragons definitely do exist.
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Oct 7, 2023 11:01
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feedmegin posted:Not to be too pedantic but dragons definitely do exist. To be even more pedantic, that's an animal named after dragons, not a dragon. And only in English, even.
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Oct 7, 2023 11:24
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A dragon is an animal named after dragons. You know, like the dragons in the Bible, or the ones the Roman army uses as standards. No one would say that an earthworm isn't a worm and is only named after worms, even though the English word worm has the same semantic history. It's clear that there's some overlap conceptually between worms and worms: they're long, they're thin, they're creepy (literally, they creep about on or in the ground), they twist about, you may well find them in a burial mound if you go digging up treasure. Other features like the scales or the fire or the wings or the penetrating hypnotic gaze or the literal identity with Satan may be present in only some worms, but what do you expect, they can't all be Smaug the Terrible, chiefest and greatest of calamities. Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a taxonomy?
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Oct 7, 2023 12:07
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Libluini posted:To be even more pedantic, that's an animal named after dragons, not a dragon. And only in English, even. Shakespeare didn't write any of those plays, it was someone else with the same name.
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Oct 7, 2023 19:13
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the only animal on earth truly worthy of the name dragon is the bombardier beetle
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Oct 7, 2023 19:53
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Benagain posted:I mean people had found fossils and poo poo plus in much more recent times people thought that moose and platypi were mythical.
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Oct 7, 2023 21:21
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If I were a farmer with no internet access who learned everything via word of mouth it would be very easy to convince me that dragons existed somewhere else even if I had never seen one. I'd just be like "wow that's crazy."
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Oct 7, 2023 21:27
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There are fully literate educated people connected to a source of knowledge that dwarfs the Library of Alexandria who've convinced themselves the earth is flat because they can't stand on a basketball. Don't take much convincing for people to believe what they want to believe. Regardless of if they thought dragons real, the purpose in the story is obviously symbolic. I doubt anyone was really concerned with if the dragons existed as much as they were with the actions they took when meeting Lil Jesus
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Oct 7, 2023 21:31
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