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LLSix posted:
Akershus Fortress is also an active military base. I was there when I was first drafted. There's also the Medieval Park. Ekeberg also have some historical sites. It also have some really cool sculptures:  (the buttplug gnome isn't even among the top ten weirdest sculptures in the park).
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Feb 25, 2022 19:57
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Taishi Ci posted:There is a trope about times of peace and prosperity in Chinese history that "cities left their gates open even at night and travelers did not take anything which had been forgotten by the wayside".
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Mar 31, 2022 12:53
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WoodrowSkillson posted:malaria was worldwide pre contact iirc We think about malaria as a tropical disease today but even Norway had a malaria epidemic in 1850.
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Jun 6, 2022 17:15
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Probably a big part of it is if someone is that effective a bandit, better to have them on your side. Pretty much the reasoning behind privateers.
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Jun 16, 2022 12:34
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feedmegin posted:Noting, of course, that the ancient world did not think specific groups of people were subhuman. That's a truth with some qualifiers. It's true that they didn't rank people by the color of their skin but they still thought that specific groups were subhuman. Germanic tribes for example was considered, as a whole, primitive drunks and the romans hated the gauls so much that Caesar could commit what in our days would be considered genocide against them and be considered a great hero for it.
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Jun 26, 2022 16:40
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feedmegin posted:That's the thing, though. As a German, you could learn Latin/Greek, stop wearing trousers, shave and become 'civilised' and that would work just fine. That's something that just doesn't apply to black people in the 19th century US, for example. That's, again, a truth with some qualifiers. Stilicho for example was a brilliant general who was completely loyal to the idiot emperor Honorius. Yet he couldn't be completely trusted because he was part barbarian.
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Jun 26, 2022 18:20
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skasion posted:She became witch-queen of the shortass eastern barbarians and…apparently did a pretty good job. Seems to me that they kept her locked up and killed everyone that knew after her death.
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Jun 28, 2022 10:50
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Coinage is a funny thing since in both ancient and modern times, currency is a tricky thing to deal with as a country and an individual. It takes a certain level of resources and organisation to be able to mint currency after all. (and now I want to play Civ again...) Fun fact: It took a long time for vikings to get their own coins. They were completely dependent on arabic dirhams. So when the arabic silver mines ran dry the entire norse economic basically collapsed, trading ports like Birka were abandoned and there were civil wars. To solve this the vikings then decided to invade the British Isles again in order to get more silver.
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Jun 29, 2022 15:59
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Medenmath posted:As far as Roman coins go, are there any that would actually be considered rare and important just on their own, even without the context of where they were found? I assume there are a lot more coins with Marcus Aurelius' face on them than, like, Otho's. Coins with well known emperors like Augustus and Caesar is going to be worth a lot more than emperors that no one has heard of. Then there's the gold coins that's gonna be worth a lot simply because they're made of gold.
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Jun 30, 2022 18:11
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e:nm
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Jul 1, 2022 16:40
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Crab Dad posted:Aztecs had it right by sacrificing warriors. Children are useless and easy to make more. A good warrior? Now that takes time and talent. The aztecs did sacrifice children though.
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Jul 2, 2022 09:27
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Grevling posted:Probably a lot of expeditions in the past were just some captain getting hired or ordered to scout an area, he goes there, he comes back and submits a report, gets paid, says "well, that was crazy" and lives out his life, his report if written down ends up unread in some archive and eventually lost forever. Or in the case of Xu Fu, using it as a way to escape from a clearly insane ruler and becoming a king in Japan.
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Jul 14, 2022 16:58
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The Lone Badger posted:How about "I know that I know nothing, and am therefore the wisest of all." The teacher sighs as he unlocks the hemlock cabinet.
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Jul 21, 2022 14:49
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:niche question: does anyone have a lot to say itt about the history of color? a professor i knew from way back when was on the university's social media talking about how not only did homer not have a word for the color blue--he described the seas as the color of "wine dark"--but neither did ancient hebrey and assyrian texts, icelandic sagas, or hindu vedas. blue was mentioned in ancient egyptian texts though. SlothfulCobra posted:
There's a village in the Middle East where a new sign language emerged because a lot of the population was deaf and the village was isolated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language
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Jul 30, 2022 11:16
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ScienceSeagull posted:The isekai chat reminds me, there was a Reddit thread about how you would survive if you woke up in Medieval Europe with only the clothes on your back, no modern technology. Someone posted an elaborate plan for how he'd steal a horse, pretend to be a monk who'd taken a vow of silence (to avoid the language barrier), and use his modern knowledge to conquer all of Eurasia and then the New World. The most important stage in his plan? Inventing pasta! There might have been a thread on some other subreddit mocking it, but I can't find either that or the original. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a parody of this trope where Arthur Dent ends up in a foreign civilization and realizes that the only practical skill he has is to make a decent sandwich.
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Aug 1, 2022 06:07
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"I, the mighty Ashurnasirpal, made monkeys gently caress."
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Oct 2, 2022 11:02
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Lady Radia posted:not sure i've read a single argument about how bad blimps/airships/zeppelins are here that counteracts "they look really cool" Ice Cube agrees.
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Oct 3, 2022 10:17
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MikeCrotch posted:
I'm guessing that the ones making those complaints did not fight in the front lines?
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Oct 18, 2022 17:21
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Jazerus posted:imagine being the monk that erased lives of famous whores to get parchment for your cheese recipes A hero 
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Oct 22, 2022 18:19
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ughhhh posted:Is there a visual indicator that identifies someone as a prostitute in Roman frescos during the late republican or early imperial period? Other than being naked and doing sex stuff ofc. I don't know if it's portrayed in roman frescos, but female prostitutes were required to wear togas. Alhazred fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Nov 2, 2022 |
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Nov 2, 2022 18:32
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Tias posted:Pyramids: built by drafted freemen or slaves - and why? They were built by fremen.
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Nov 9, 2022 15:59
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:Here's a random question I've been wondering about for a while (mostly due to having to plan an upcoming trip to Germany). How did leisure travel work in the ancient Roman world? I've read somewhere that there was a surprising amount of tourism, especially by the rich, but did they have, like, private travel agents or local administration set up to facilitate travelers or did you just show up with cash and hire some random people to show you around? If I'm some random rich Roman who shows up in Alexandria and wants to see the sights, how would I even go about finding a guide? (I guess I'd tell my slave to work it out but how would he or she do that?) Was it exclusively the rich who vacationed or would working people also travel? Somewaht related: I love that even in ancient Rome they had lovely tourist souvenirs like 'I went to Rome and all I got you was this stylus".
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Nov 22, 2022 15:17
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FreudianSlippers posted:Here in Iceland anything older than a hundred years is automatically protected and can't be owned privately and must be surrendered to the National Museum. Same in Norway. It doesn't even have to be that old, the wreck of the Blücher for example is officially protected as both a cultural heritage site and a burial site.
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Nov 27, 2022 12:23
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ChubbyChecker posted:most royals did this kind of poo poo The Aeneid is basically pro-Caesar propaganda.
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Dec 4, 2022 17:14
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Randarkman posted:German names are easy street. I've never met a single foreigner who managed to pronounce my Norwegian name, even after hearing it said, and written out they just give up, it's not really hard, but the "Ø" and dipthong. It's not really difficult, it just seems people don't know where to start and give up on the "Ø" (which is like "u" in urge). Not only is my name difficult for foreigners to pronounce, even norwegians have trouble with it because it's pronounced differently depending on which parts of Norway you were born.
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Dec 28, 2022 12:27
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FreudianSlippers posted:I like the Discworld books where the main setting Ankh Morpork (fantasy Victorian London if it was also a renaissance Italian city state) is built on it self several times because of centuries of silt from the River Ankh building up so there's city on city on city (most of it filled with mud). This becomes a plot point several times when people use the former ground floor (now sub-basement) to get up to no good. Old underground cities comes up a lot in fiction. Judge Dredd has Old New York populated with subterranean vampires, Futurama got one populated with mutants and even Duckburg has an old Duckburg underground (mainly used by the Beagle Boys to hide in).
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Jan 8, 2023 12:20
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Locally produced dildos not good enough then?
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Feb 22, 2023 12:26
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Is there somewhere good to read up on this kind of stuff about the Vikings?
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Mar 11, 2023 09:03
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WoodrowSkillson posted:that's basically how it goes though, since history is full of exactly that happening. especially steppe societies threatening the Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Chinese with invasions and being paid off to go home. This was what the vikings established with "danegeld" which literally means the "danish tax". The vikings made a deal with the british rulers that if they paid a set amount of silver each year the vikings wouldn't raid them.
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Mar 14, 2023 18:38
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Tulip posted:(the symbolism of making sure that military aristocrats were visibly at war and literally elevated being well above that). It's weird how it took so long before people realized that that is a terrible idea. To have your leader exposed like that, fully knowing that your army will collapse if he's killed and leaving your country without someone in charge.
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Jun 6, 2023 07:11
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