Tulip posted:

Tulip posted:

Probably not royal, but otherwise sure I guess.

Also the dog is making me go "hm" because it looks so chihuahua but its a 1470 painting so pretty doubtful there were any chihuahuas in 1470 Burgundy.

Grand Fromage posted:

There's a handful of those genuine random rear end nothing peasant to emperor rises and they're all fascinating.

SlothfulCobra posted:

I think there were bathhouses even in early America, but the only things I've found specifically seem to be swimming pools called baths. I guess it can kinda get blurry between the two.

People gotta wash and putting plumbing in every building is too much .

Brawnfire posted:

In my city of Rochester, NY there used to be a sulfer spring that a bath house was operated around in the early 19th century. The water was meant to be good for all the swamp- and mosquito-related agues and fevers and lesions and poo poo. They had both sulfer and fresh water, hot and cold.

Arglebargle III posted:

Can anyone explain to me how medieval guilds worked and how they enforced their charters? What kind of landscape would a foreign merchant wanting to engage business in a new city encounter?

quote:

Guild monopolies were shielded in a variety of ways. Some limits on competition arose from geographic factors such as high transportation costs, raw material endowments, urban agglomeration economies, or limits on migration (Ogilvie 1997, 2011). Others came from political protection. Guilds often secured government barriers to trade, as when the Venetian state blocked imports of French mirrors to protect the Murano glassblowers’ guild (Trivellato 2006) or the governments of most European states blocked imports of cheap ribbons from the Netherlands or Basel produced on the forbidden innovation of the multi-shuttle ribbon frame (Davids 2008; Pfister 2008). Guilds also obtained direct enforcement of their privileges from municipal and state governments (La Force 1965; Bossenga 1988; Rosenband 1997; Ogilvie 1997, 2003; Wiesner 2000; Trivellato 2006; Horn 2006; Hafter 2007).

Archival records are replete with cases of guild members penalized by the public authorities for producing above their guild quota, using prohibited techniques, or employing women. In 1669, for instance, when the weaver Hannss Schrotter broke his guild’s rules by employing a female servant to weave, his town court fined him the equivalent of a maidservant’s average annual wage (Ogilvie 2003). Public law-courts also punished black-market producers for illegally infringing on guild monopolies, as in 1711 when the Württemberg state responded to complaints by the retailers’ guild against a converted Jew’s widow by closing down her village shop, or in 1742 when a town court jailed a villager’s wife after a complaint by the local nailsmith that she was “dealing in foreign nails, which violated the nailsmiths’ guild ordinance, and damaged him in his craft” (as quoted in Ogilvie 2003).

Governments also supported guilds in regulating labor markets, as in 1781, when the pinmakers’ guild of a Normandy town fined a journeyman five years’ wages for quitting his job counter to guild regulations, and the municipal authorities supported the guild on the grounds that “if workers could leave their masters when they please, insubordination and anarchy will result, and ruin manufacturing” (as quoted in Horn 2006, p. 45). The authorities also punished consumers who purchased wares from nonguilded craftsmen, as in Bohemia when the count of Friedland’s court responded to complaints by the local tailors’ guild in 1662 by fining three villagers for buying cheap garments from nonguilded interlopers, by which they had “premeditatedly tried to deceive the authorities and the court, and sought their own advantage” (Státní Oblastní Archiv Litomeˇrˇice, Pobocˇka Deˇcˇín 1662).

zoux posted:

I don't know if this is the case with that specific era, but there are a lot of art styles that we look at now as "bad" but there were clear cultural contexts and reasons for these depictions. Like new kingdom Egyptian art, it looks rudimentary and primitive, but ancient Egyptians had a rigid set of rules about proportions and aspective view. Then you look at the Amarna style created during and right after Akhenaten's reign and it's more stylized and dynamic and, to the modern eye, just looks better. But art criticism is eternal and all that art (and Akhenaten's reign) got damnato memoriaed by subsequent pharaohs almost immediately after he died. (This post has not been fact checked by LaB who knows about all this stuff way better than me and would love to see her elaborate on the transition into and back from the Amarna style, and Egyptian artistic conventions in general)

zoux posted:

I don't know if this is the case with that specific era, but there are a lot of art styles that we look at now as "bad" but there were clear cultural contexts and reasons for these depictions. Like new kingdom Egyptian art, it looks rudimentary and primitive, but ancient Egyptians had a rigid set of rules about proportions and aspective view. Then you look at the Amarna style created during and right after Akhenaten's reign and it's more stylized and dynamic and, to the modern eye, just looks better. But art criticism is eternal and all that art (and Akhenaten's reign) got damnato memoriaed by subsequent pharaohs almost immediately after he died. (This post has not been fact checked by LaB who knows about all this stuff way better than me and would love to see her elaborate on the transition into and back from the Amarna style, and Egyptian artistic conventions in general)

E. Karshner, Thought, Utterance Power 2011 posted:

In The Mind of Ancient Egypt, Jan Assman identifies this belief in the relationship between the perception and expression of existence as being characteristic of a “cosmological society.” He writes that a cosmological society “lives by a model of cosmic forms of order, which it transforms into political and social order by means of meticulous observation and performance of rituals” (2002, 205). According to Assman’s definition, a cosmological society creates meaning based on the close observation of foundational forms in a manner that closely references the original forms or order. Assman goes on to explain that meaning emerges from the ability to “adapt the order of the human world to that of the cosmos [and] to keep the cosmic process itself in good working order” (2002, 205). The cosmos itself becomes a heuristic revealing mystical knowledge that establishes the local, personal, and social order at the same time that the local, personal, and social order serves as a heuristic in establishing magical practices that maintain the cosmological order. In other words, while the agent is speaking from a social scene to a human audience, he or she is simultaneously addressing deities in the cosmological realm. The disputants and the discourse, then, speak from and to a complex, multilayered situation.

In magical utterances, there is an appeal to another set of circumstances outside the immediate scene of the agent. This rhetorical scene of magic is characterized by Mircea Eliade as a life lived “on a two-fold plane; it takes its course as human existence and, at the same time, shares in a transhuman life, that of the cosmos of the gods” (1957, 167). Symbolically, this twofold existence is represented by what Eliade terms a homology. Simply defined, a homology is a correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm.

J. Hellum, Toward an Understanding of the Use of Myth in Pyramid Texts 2014 posted:

The lack of narrative myth in Old Kingdom religious literature has long been the subject of discussion. Recently, the discussion has moved from whether myth existed in the Old Kingdom, to how it existed. The Pyramid Texts provide an excellent testing ground for the study of myth. Each king possesses a distinct group of texts, different from the other kings', but they are all used for the same goal and in exactly the same physical context. It is proposed that the architecture of the textual chambers works as a boundary for the texts, and that in doing so, it provides a framework for understanding the corpora of texts as a myth in themselves. Thus, the architecture is the metaphorical beginning and end of the myth, and the texts can be examined as the content of that myth. Together, they comprise a metamyth, a myth that includes the physical context of the texts and their literary content.

quote:

If there is a meaning to be found in mythology, this cannot reside in the isolated elements which enter into the composition of a myth, but only in the way those elements are combined. 2. Although myth belongs to the same category as language, being, as a matter of fact, only part of it, language in myth unveils specific properties. 3. Those properties are only to be found above the ordinary linguistic level; that is, they exhibit more complex features beside those which are to be found in any kind of linguistic expression. - Claude Lévi-Strauss

Toward an Understanding of the Use of Myth in Pyramid Texts posted:

From the evidence of the Pyramid Texts, and generally throughout the ancient literature, the Egyptian use of myth in the Old Kingdom seems to have been based on allusion. This is most obviously the case in the funerary texts, where the king was set side by side with the deities and his actions echoed theirs and vice versa. By alluding to situations in which the king was geographically on a divine plane, the actions of the king were paralleled with the actions of the deities on that plane.

Toward an Understanding of the Use of Myth in Pyramid Texts posted:

The fact that the king was placed into the cosmography, solar passage, and myth of ascent by virtue of his use of the texts as a vehicle of ascendance indicates that the foundational mythic ideas were understood to be as real as the ascendance of the king. For the king to ascend to the gods, he had to move through celestial geography. In the process, the concept of the sky as a part of the afterlife was dropped and the reality of the sky as part the afterlife was assumed. In other words, the king, being mobile in the afterlife and hence alive in that environment, reflected that quality of reality on his surroundings as a direct result of his own animation. The same was true conversely, the environment providing a goal to which the king endeavoured to attain. As with much of Egyptian religion, the idea was circular and unending.109

Wikipedia posted:

Atenism, also known as the Aten religion,[1] the Amarna religion,[2] and the Amarna heresy, was a religion in ancient Egypt. It was founded by Akhenaten, a pharaoh who ruled the New Kingdom under the Eighteenth Dynasty.[3] The religion is described as monotheistic or monolatristic, although some Egyptologists argue that it was actually henotheistic.[4] Atenism was centred on the cult of Aten, a god depicted as the disc of the Sun. Aten was originally an aspect of Ra, Egypt's traditional solar deity, though he was later asserted by Akhenaten as being the superior of all deities.[5] In the 14th century BC, Atenism was Egypt's state religion for around 20 years, and Akhenaten met the worship of other gods with persecution; he closed many traditional temples, instead commissioning the construction of Atenist temples, and also suppressed religious traditionalists. However, subsequent pharaohs toppled the movement in the aftermath of Akhenaten's death, thereby restoring Egyptian civilization's traditional polytheistic religion. Large-scale efforts were then undertaken to remove from Egypt and Egyptian records any presence or mention of Akhenaten, Atenist temples, and Atenist assertions of a uniquely supreme god.

Component Design as a Narrative Device in Amarna Tomb Art posted:

Narrative is usually perceived as a sequence of episodes conceived within a temporal continuity. A pictorial narrative often evokes in the audience a sense of time and space -- even if arbitrary or fabulous. However, the art historian who looks to Amarna tomb art for a unified story beginning with "once upon a time," followed by sequentially ordered images and ending with "they lived happily in the here-after," is likely to be disappointed, because the story does not unfold in a linear time or a sequential use of space.

Instead the narrative process in Amarna tomb art is selective and the "story" constructed in sequences of logically and temporally connected episodes within a timeless universal. As a result of the special role that time plays in funerary pictorial narrative, the images in the Amarna tombs are given a conceptual ordering that emphasizes contemporary scenes and events designed to induce audience participation. To succeed in this requires an audience with the capacity to share, to comprehend both the experiences depicted and meaning of the images. It is in this recreation of temporal events that we come to realize that there are a number of ways to organize narrative time and that temporal continuity can be maintained within the larger (universal) and timeless (cosmological) depiction of contemporary events.

Toward an Understanding of the Use of Myth in Pyramid Texts posted:

Klimkeit has made the observation that "the spatial type of thinking (is) more relevant to the Egyptian than the temporal," meaning that the area of the sky (and the general after-life) as the setting for the king's journey is more important than the time it took to be traversed. Time, in this context, was endless, one might almost say non-existent, with the sole indication that time passed being the movement of the sun through the sky; space, on the other hand, was there to be moved through. Events occurring within the limits of the sky were contingent on space rather than on time. The length of time it took the king to reach the seat of the deities was never mentioned or alluded to in the Texts; the journey and accompanying use of space provided the focus.

Component Design as a Narrative Device in Amarna Tomb Art posted:

Some of the most intriguing art of ancient Egypt was produced during the Amarna period. Among the art historical problems pertaining to the various artistic productions of the period are the forty-four rock tombs carved by the officials who served Akhenaten at Amarna. The tombs (seventeen in the northern group and twenty-seven in the southern group) comprise a unit of material contemporary with the reign of Akhenaten and thus form a primary source of information about the Amarna period and Akhenaten's role as king. However, while many unique features of Amarna tomb art have been discussed, scholars have not recognized their original purpose: to blend skillfully events from the career of the deceased official with the theological doctrine of Atenism and Akhenaten's authority as king. Embedded in the style and use of images, scenes, and events contemporary with the audience's perception of them are metaphorical expressions of the political, theological, and historical pressures of the Amarna period. Thus, Amarna as the seat of government during Akhenaten's reign represents both a political and a religious entity. When we regard the tombs in this order and context we find their structure is not an ancillary element, but one that is primary to the programmatic ensemble and order of political and religious circumstances.

Component Design as a Narrative Device in Amarna Tomb Art posted:

Closely related to the point of the deceased's status is the presence of an audience in the tombs, a fact that distinguishes Amarna tomb art from Egyptian tomb art in general. While Egyptian tombs are usually thought of as sealed for eternity, it is known that the Amarna tombs were open and that friends and relatives made memorial visits. There are several indications that there was access to the tombs including various desert roads leading to them and to and from the desert altars. Petrie has attributed use of the roads to workmen and funerary processions of friends and relatives. The presence of votive stelae in tomb 23 of Any verifies that during the Amarna period friends of the deceased made visits to the tombs.

In the tombs, status is asserted only in relationship to the king. He is the largest figure depicted and the authority behind all communicative acts with the Aten. The psvchological effect of Akhenaten on the audience is purposeful: to affirm his right to rule through the rites he performs to the god, in order to perpetuate the ideological and social order of his reign. While status may affect the manner in which a subject is presented, the way in which it is represented determines the political message the audience will take. It is precisely this existential dimension, that is, the exploitation of the audience's time and space, on which all else depends. Herein lies the key to the narrative technique of component parts in Amarna tomb art. The tomb space is contemporary with the spectator's time. In reality, representing space and moving in space are two different things, and they can be distinguished from the implied movement depicted in the reliefs. However, such movement also manifests itself in the duration of the spectator's time and represents not only a movement from but a movement toward something.

By attributing a temporal significance to the tomb environment, we are also admitting that the narrative aspect of the art must be grounded in the spectator's perception and that the spectator is the bearer of meaning. Because the pictorial space in the tombs is structured and oriented to the spectator, time mediates between the object and the audience's perception of the subject. The purpose of the syntactically marked narrative units [that is, the tomb design and layout] is to use time to shape the spectator's experience and give it meaning. Moreover, though the transitions from one tomb area to another area are spatial, the links between the tomb chambers and relief subjects are metaphorical expressions of Akhenaten's ideology and are by extension common political experiences held by the audience. Thus, while isolated from the real world, the tombs contain within themselves the constructed regulated structures of that world.

Component Design as a Narrative Device in Amarna Tomb Art posted:

Narrative has been defined as storytelling. It has been assumed that narrative necessitates some expenditure of time. While "story" may represent basic material of narrative, time has traditionally been considered a necessary condition. In pictorial narrative, space, actual or illusionary, must be considered an additional condition, whether the narrative unfolds in single or multiple images.

[...]

But the Amarna artist goes beyond these themes and creates a system that illustrates a complex interweaving of images and texts to produce a message understandable only to viewers familiar with the religion of the Aten and not the earlier traditions of the worship of Amun. To comprehend the system one must understand Amarna tomb art against the climate of religious controversy raging throughout Akhenaten's reign. Without this background, it is difficult for us today to perceive the underlying narrative. Use of the typological facade image certainly limits the narrative as story. But the images that are evoked form a basic reference to the narrative theme, and it is a combination of images, rather than one story, that is significant for the development of theme in pictorial narrative. The genius of the Amarna artist lies in the originality with which he conceived and exploited narrative as theme. Thus regardless of the simplicity or complexity of each narrative, the structure of the narrative remains the same.

Against this thematic manipulation, the relief panels interact in such a way that the audience is brought into the narrative experience. Even though there is a greater emphasis on theme in Amarna narrative than on story line, the images and texts are able to communicate a profound historical story. All of this is possible and achieved through the use of metaphor, moving the audience to experience the real through imitation.

Grand Fromage posted:

I don't believe they made actual soap out of it, at least not in any serious way. Soap was actually a major import good from Germania. The native Roman way was the oil and scrape like the Greeks.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Grand Fromage posted:

I don't believe they made actual soap out of it, at least not in any serious way. Soap was actually a major import good from Germania. The native Roman way was the oil and scrape like the Greeks.

skasion posted:

Medieval Western Europe was by no means short on weird looking dogs. Idk what that one is but there was probably a specific word for it.

Arglebargle III posted:

Soap-making was certainly known. In fact it's not hard to discover by accident. All you have to do is spill hot olive oil into wood ash. I wonder who figured out that the weird dirty balls of sticky stuff that resulted were useful enough to produce on purpose.

Pliny, Natural History 28.51 posted:

Soap, too, is very useful for this purpose [treating scrofulous sores], an invention of the Gauls for giving a reddish tint to the hair. This substance is prepared from tallow and ashes, the best ashes for the purpose being those of the beech and yoke-elm: there are two kinds of it, the hard soap and the liquid, both of them much used by the people of Germany, the men, in particular, more than the women.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

When Mr. "Akhen-aten" got got and traditional Egyptian religion was re-established as the proper way to be, the magical structures (tombs) built in support of Atenism had to be rendered ineffective, and a return was made to the previously established magical religious practice (tomb art) meant to empower and reinforce the onto-cosmology supported by the traditional Gods of Egypt.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

As expression of traditional Egyptian religion placed its emphasis on the element of spatial orientation, Atenism differentiated itself by placing focus on the temporal.

Mister Olympus posted:

I think the dog in the painting looks a lot like the taxidermy, it's just doing the backing-up-while-surprised thing that dogs do

WoodrowSkillson posted:

on the oil vs soap thing, soap already existed in Italy for a long time before the Roman Empire. So is this more of a "rich guys/city folk do the fancy oil bath" while a farmer in Hispania or Cisalpine Gaul is jsut taking a bath with soap?

Grand Fromage posted:

We unfortunately don't have a good Lives of Famous Soaps to read about it, but what seems to have happened is soap was mainly a thing among Gauls and Germans, and as the Romans pushed into that area some people started using and liking it, it became an import luxury, and over centuries soap became more popular until by late antiquity it had displaced oil scraping.

WoodrowSkillson posted:

yet the name comes from latin and they knew about making it in the 7th century BCE