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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.
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# ? Nov 30, 2023 20:30 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 14:50 |
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Schvi-tzu
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# ? Nov 30, 2023 20:45 |
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Looks like a long-legged weasel. Which I guess does describe a chihuahua.
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# ? Nov 30, 2023 21:01 |
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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?
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# ? Nov 30, 2023 21:06 |
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The thing about guilds is that guilds were generally for niche or highly technically professions. This makes enforcing their charters and rules relatively easy. If there are a limited number of people who can do what you want, you are probably going to play by their rules. The production of plate armor in particular was a lot like this, with a handful of powerful guilds (particularly in Italy) monopolizing it for the most part. They're sort of like a trade union in that sense. By controlling the labor or production of something specific, they could make certain demands of the local lord/government. They also generally looked out for their members and their families. Regarding merchants specifically - I don't know a ton but I do know that merchant guilds would generally look out for foreign merchants, because it was beneficial for them. If I'm a French merchant showing up in England for the first time, the local ruler could easily steal my poo poo if he wanted to get some quick cash. What am I going to do about it? Well typically to prevent this kind of predatory behavior the local merchant guild would then refuse to provide their services. This is a problem for the local lord. Not having some foreign merchant come back isn't a big deal, but his local merchants denying services is, so he doesn't harass the foreign merchants. This also means those local English merchants, when abroad in France, can reasonably expect the same protections from the merchant's guild there. Merchant guilds also sort of guaranteed the reliability of a particular merchant, since the entire guild could be held accountable for an individual failing to provide services, make payments in full, etc.
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# ? Nov 30, 2023 21:39 |
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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 . Tulip posted:Probably not royal, but otherwise sure I guess. The only specifically old small dog breed I know is the turnspit, but it doesn't look much like it. I think it can be hard interpreting medieval art because we're used to a lot of visual language that had yet to develop at the time.
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# ? Nov 30, 2023 21:42 |
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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 fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Nov 30, 2023 |
# ? Nov 30, 2023 22:05 |
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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
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# ? Nov 30, 2023 22:19 |
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Wow I had no idea Emperor Justin was literally a Balkan swine herd who walked from the country into Constantinople and turned up looking tall and handsome when the recruiting Sergeant for the Imperial Guard was looking for new recruits and the rest is history.
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# ? Nov 30, 2023 23:26 |
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There's a handful of those genuine random rear end nothing peasant to emperor rises and they're all fascinating.
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# ? Nov 30, 2023 23:39 |
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Wait that "Byzantine history be like" meme video was a documentary?
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# ? Nov 30, 2023 23:58 |
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Grand Fromage posted:There's a handful of those genuine random rear end nothing peasant to emperor rises and they're all fascinating. Does Theodora count too?
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 00:18 |
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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. 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.
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 00:20 |
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Heck the Eastern Han dynasty has the Liu clan founder starting out as a lieutenant in the army in the middle of bumfuck nowhere Hunan who decided to rebel against the hated oppressor Wang Mang. With Regard To olive oil you have to conceptualize it as a substance that was at once the primary fuel for domestic combustion, the primary cooking fat, and the primary industrial feedstock for items like medicine, soap, and lubricant. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Dec 1, 2023 |
# ? Dec 1, 2023 00:22 |
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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. Mineral Springs are still a thing hanging on in the US. They were still really big just before WWII because of FDR.
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 00:26 |
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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? Depends on local stuff, a lot of times there were things like 'the local merchant's guild has a monopoly on buying or selling wool in Leichester, so you have to go through them' ( https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/leics/vol4/pp31-54#anchorn34 ). Or on a bigger scale, the English Company of the Staple had exclusive rights to sell wool to foreign markets. It varied a lot in time and place, and whether guilds served communities or just guild members is a subject of considerable debate among historians (here's one of the more negative perspectives https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.28.4.169 which might be a good source for 'what problems would the guilds cause if you were a foreign merchant'). 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). And here's the laws of Norwich from the 1300s or so, which includes information on rights to sell or buy stuff. https://web.archive.org/web/20090216130412fw_/http://trytel.com/~tristan/towns/norwich8.html
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 01:59 |
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Yeah rich people hated all of that and here we are in a glorious future
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 02:01 |
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I mean those guilds were run by the rich people lol, you don't get to own an entire sector of international trade by being poor
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 02:09 |
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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) I recently got a big book of Egyptian art and history mostly for the pretty pictures, and thing is most of what we know of as Egyptian art is basically the specific house style of tombs and temples, which had very specific rules for pose and proportion. They've found drafts and practice grids, used so the style remains consistent at any size. Like a lot of things the exceptions stand out, sculptures and statuettes are a lot more varied, especially when made out of different and rare (to them) materials, and some figures even in the classical style are drawn differently if they have notable features. I also saw a picture of an unusual painting that depicts some guys wrestling, with what looks like individual moves drawn blow by blow like a comic. And because people are people, there's also hieroglyphic graffiti.
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 03:50 |
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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) Haha! You are really kind to think of me here, I am flattered and honored. I was also ready to demur completely from having anything interesting to say on the topic -- my interests have lain alongside analysis of Egyptian literary traditions moreso than pictorial traditions, your casual analysis of Amarna art here has me interested in hearing more of what you might know about it in fact! -- when I realized I actually did have a synthesis of relevant fun facts to share! Okay, I say fun, but this is actually going to be a bit dense probably so I hope you knew what you were getting everybody in for, right? Ready? Here we go. As I say, a lot of the things I am comfortable saying that "I know" about Egyptian religion are based in literary tradition and/or religious instruction texts -- for example, I will assert that myth and narrative were key ontological elements of ancient Egyptian religion, and religious tradition (ie: magic). A properly constructed and communicated narrative had the power to shape both cosmic reality, the eternal cyclical macrocosm of the Gods, and cultural reality, the microcosm of contemporaneous human society. Now, this might sound pretty wild to a modern thinker, but since us both understanding and accepting that this was a cornerstone of ontological belief is necessary for me to move forward with this post effectively, I'll include a quotation from a paper on Egyptian rhetoric I've mentioned in here before, Edward Karshner's "Thought, Utterance, Power," as supporting evidence (the author himself citing a pair of knowledgeable sources) and then assume you believe me about this and continue on. 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. Okay, so the people of ancient Egypt believed themselves part of a homology; part of the way they participated in and maintained this homology, maintained the cosmological order itself, was expressing it through myth. Just as Isis could cut through Set's sly persuasive speech and decipher the truth He tried to disguise within it, so could a mediator debating in a court of law suss out the truth buried in their opponent's remarks. Just as Ra's barque crossed the sky every night so that He might do battle with and defeat Apep, the embodiment of chaos and primordial darkness, so each day the sun would rise again and remind us of the triumph of the forces of righteousness, stability, and order over those of chaos and destruction. Myth, or the narrative involved in myth, was part of the very basis of functioning reality. Despite this, myth did not always take the form of purely literary tradition (!). Ancient Egypt evinced use of architecture as a method of shaping and developing images or fragments of story into creative narrative. We will come back to the Amarna art shortly, but first we will look at the abstract of a paper by Jennifer Hellum called "Toward an Understanding of the Use of Myth in Pyramid Texts." 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. It begins with a quotation from anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. 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 I am not going to focus too much on this paper, but it is very helpful for us here! What we are taking from it is the proposition that, in the absence of what we recognize today as "traditional" myth narrative such as we see in the New Kingdom and are well acquainted with from later culture like the Greeks and Romans, there was an established tradition of Egyptians expressing myth through the narrative framing device of tomb architecture. The paper's author also gives a nod to that homology idea we discussed earlier. 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. So to summarize what we have so far: the religious cosmology of the time required "the Universe" to have a reciprocal relationship with "human reality." They were interdependent and the effects of actions taken in one half of the homology played out within both of them. Members of society were expected to participate in that cosmology through a relationship with myth, the narratives of which can be expressed either pictorially or with language, to maintain a properly functioning Universe. Finally, as far back as the Old Kingdom we see evidence of physically constructed spaces designed to evoke mythical narrative; and by building the "spell," if you will (and I am afraid you must), of the mytho-magical narrative into the pyramids themselves, the king was reinforcing the ontological narrative expressed thereby. Hellum alludes again to a perceived blurring between myth and reality. 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 "As with much of Egyptian religion, the idea was circular and unending." Truth lol. Any time I am discussing these things with anybody offline I am constantly doing these "so on and so forth" circular motions with my hands to try to summarize what I mean, it's terrible, I gotta stop that. Okay but here's the thing though, this practice of using funerary texts to reinforce the cosmology of the living religion -- Akhenaten, the Amarna period pharoah, I think everyone here knows what he's most famous for. He was responsible for the national conversion to Atenism, which I will ask Wikipedia to remind us about because I dislike him personally and so he doesn't get my energy. 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. Atenism So here now is one additional paper to which I will be making reference: "Component Design as a Narrative Device in Amarna Tomb Art" by Elizabeth Meyers. As you said in your original post, zoux, there was a homogeneity of expression in funerary art which we can now posit is due to being carefully organized and expressed onto-cosmological religious myth. Right? It supports an expression of reality as understood through a relationship with that religion and those Gods. And now here Akhenaten is with a whole new religion! With whole new myths! Akhenaten had to come up with a new, distinct way of presenting the components of myth and narrative to separate his God's cosmology from those of the previous ones -- so he did. This paper starts with some now-familiar themes... 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. ...with a twist! Here's something interesting from Hellum's paper, the one about myth in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom. 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. Note that the author of the Amarna paper discusses the way the art of the Amarna tombs are laid out to create a special relationship with time, while the author of the Old Kingdom emphasizes an observation that Egyptian thinking at that time, with that religion, was predominantly tuned to space. But back to Amarna: 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. Ah! Maybe previous scholars have overlooked this, but not the attentive folks here you all guessed what Akhenaten was up to. As I recall, this paper does not quite dare get into the full ontology involved behind this practice of the king "to blend skillfully events [...] with theological doctrine." But he was practicing a new or altered form of that same onto-cosmological expression centuries of Egyptian kings had practiced before him: developing his narrative, developing his religious cosmology, strengthening his relationship to his God and in turn his God's influence over homologous reality. This raises questions, of course. This practice has long been used to strengthen the ontologies of Gods which were now the enemy. How does one implement it in such a way that one would be sure it empowered only his new, favored God, and not all the ones for whom it had been used for centuries and centuries beforehand? Is it that one could selectively alter the very experience of others' perceptions of reality? Yes! Zoux, you describe the Amarna art as more dynamic than that of the traditional Egyptian religion, and that's because while traditional religious art emphasizes use of space, Amarna art emphasizes use of time. You remember those two excerpts up there! Here's a couple diagrams Meyers includes in her paper, which she states are the variations of standard layout for tombs of the time period. She discusses at length the way the tomb layouts -- not just the walls and corners but the doorways and overhangs and columns too -- shepherd and influence the spectator to and through the tomb. She describes the artist's use of space as a tool to actively manipulate the visitor's perception of the passage of time -- which as our Hellum paper notes, is an element once seen as wholly irrelevant in onto-cosmological narrative construction. We will highlight the following: 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. Akhenaten included the traditional element of narrative in building the structures of his religion's cosmology; but the person receiving a narrative developed in part by image or architecture is affected in their reception by those two additional elements of time and space. As expression of traditional Egyptian religion placed its emphasis on the element of spatial orientation, Atenism differentiated itself by placing focus on the temporal. I know I've said this three times now, but it's really ontologically important! Because of this simple skew in perspective on the cosmic forces involved in sacred narrative, the magic the Amarna art invoked would be seen as lingering ontological power structures for the heretic pharaoh's God -- in addition to being generally offensive. It's best not to leave those things around. 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. WOW I GOT CARRIED AWAY! TL;DR! Tomb art was explicitly magical and the tomb art of the Amarna period was meant to empower the God Aten, patron of heretic pharaoh Akhenaten. The art was unique to the period of Atenism because it reflected a different cosmology! 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. Or you know, something like that. Thanks for asking! 😅 LITERALLY A BIRD fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Dec 1, 2023 |
# ? Dec 1, 2023 04:10 |
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There's plenty of olive oil-based soaps in the world today so the Roman use of it for hygiene isn't that odd, all things considered.
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 04:12 |
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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.
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 04:16 |
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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. Of course. I just meant hygienic use of olive oil isn't particularly unusual even today. I use castile soap myself.
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 04:20 |
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literally a nerd awesome effortpost
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 05:25 |
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I saw a great exhibit on the Amarna period earlier this year that unfortunately didn't communicate almost any of what LaB just made an amazing effortpost about. That really gave a lot of needed context for what was put on display, thank you so much!
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 09:12 |
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okay I get the gist of LaB's post, Aten's art was better because it was created by a monotheistic time traveller
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 09:47 |
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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. 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. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Dec 1, 2023 |
# ? Dec 1, 2023 13:25 |
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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. Village dogs, idk what other terms might exist for them, but basically if mutt was a breed. The dogs guide their own evolutionary pressures over generations and end up pretty weird but highly adapted to their world.
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 13:49 |
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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.
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 14:08 |
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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. It's interesting to note that his son was the famous pharaoh "Tut-ankh-amun", the Living Image of Amun, originally named "Tut-ankh-aten". After the old man ate it (followed by the very brief reigns of his brother and widow), he personally led the restoration of the traditional religion (or, considering he took the throne at age nine, was forced to for political reasons, to quell the societal unrest of the Atenist period), epitomized in his and his wife's own renaming.
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 15:21 |
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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. If only they had known they are the same thing... Thanks for the post lab, didn't mean to assign you a term paper lol
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 15:46 |
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
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 15:57 |
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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?
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 16:32 |
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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? 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.
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 18:22 |
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Not to mention a little-known and isolated tribe, the Jergens, who had mastered moisturizer.
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 18:28 |
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From them we get the name for "jergin off", though it's become corrupted through the ages
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 18:34 |
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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. yet the name comes from latin and they knew about making it in the 7th century BCE
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 18:37 |
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WoodrowSkillson posted:yet the name comes from latin and they knew about making it in the 7th century BCE Sure, they knew about it. Soap goes way back. But it seems like it was in that package of cultural stuff that Romans adopted from Gauls because it was cool, like walking around with a mustache and wearing pants. Americans have known about chopsticks as long as the country's existed but I don't think you'd find them sold at Walmart 30 years ago.
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 18:43 |
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30 years ago was 1993. Ooof
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 18:56 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 14:50 |
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Also, fabulous birdpost, as always.
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# ? Dec 1, 2023 18:57 |