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Baconroll posted:Sad bit of ancient history news - King Tut's burial mask has been dropped and the large ornate beard snapped off...Then has been crudely epoxied back into place and then they managed to smear some epoxy on the face as well. Somebody on NPR was saying the visible epoxy has been there since it was excavated.
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Jan 23, 2015 02:12
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loving algae ruined our environment with their unregulated emission of carcinogenic O2.
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Jan 24, 2015 22:05
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It seems like he's researching more horse archery stuff than the longbow styles. I don't think the voiceover is matching the images in a few case (like the 5000 year thing played over more recent images). So basically practicing archery with different priorities (more speed, lower draw weight). And doing a lot of impressive trick shots, of course. Tunicate fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Jan 25, 2015 |
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Jan 25, 2015 05:35
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Boat insurance was also a pretty great money maker. Along with the equally lucrative boat insurance fraud.
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Jan 30, 2015 02:23
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Didn't the Nazis steal that eagle from Rome, anyway?
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Feb 11, 2015 21:36
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Majorian posted:Well, but here's the thing: the stuff we have in Linear B script is only the clerical/inventory stuff, but that may well be because that's all that survived. Even if Linear B couldn't be used to write poetry or prose, I have to believe that poets and writers in the cities used one script or another to write it down. You're right that your average dirt farmer wouldn't need to know Linear B to survive, but keep in mind, by the end of the Bronze Age, cities like Mycenae and Knossos had become fairly large and complex, at least by the standards of the day (e: and the Late Helladic cultures were also several hundred years old by the 12th century BC). A significant amount of the population lived in and around the palace centers, and probably didn't contribute directly to the economy - you instead had merchants and lawyers and doctors and whatever. I have to believe that these people were literate, wrote things down, and provided a market for a certain amount of poetry, literature, or even just written instruction. Whether or not they usually read or wrote things down with Linear B, or with some other script, the question still remains: what happened to these people? What happened to their literacy? Did they just all die out when the cataclysm hit their cities? Did they just decide not to pass their skills onto the next generation, when it became clear that there was so much less demand, with the palace economies gone? Was it something else altogether? We may never know, but boy, if it isn't the most interesting question to me in the whole greater mystery that is the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Have you read Letters to the Kings of Mari? Just a ton of translated tablets. It's neat to see all the random miscellaneous stuff that's been recorded, like instructions on how to properly read a liver, a message to the king saying his dog just had puppies, or trade and military instructions.
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Feb 15, 2015 17:06
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I love the bit from The Birds where Prometheus shows up holding an umbrella. Gods can't see you if you're under an umbrella.
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Mar 11, 2015 07:02
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Ras Het posted:Except that he came to the Latins via the Etruscans, I believe. And kept going until he hit Japan.
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Mar 11, 2015 21:19
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Speaking of ISIL
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Mar 12, 2015 00:51
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Bitter Mushroom posted:Just to put the subject to bed, western civilization as a whole is the modern Rome. We have plenty of columns, infighting and dicks gratified all over the place. Plus, we bitterly dispute who currently is leading Rome.
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Mar 15, 2015 00:28
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Grand Fromage posted:It's labor intensive (salt mining is a pain and there aren't a lot of places you can do it, and harvesting sea salt takes a lot of work), however also the value of salt in the ancient world has been vastly overstated in pop culture. It was certainly much more valuable than it is today but stories of people being paid in salt because it was better than money and that kind of thing are not true. Yeah, in Rome salt ran about 13 denarii per liter, or something like that. Still high compared to today, since you can get it for twenty bux a ton.
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Mar 20, 2015 18:22
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Thermopylae was an inside job.
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Mar 24, 2015 16:36
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icantfindaname posted:It was clearly the Koreans Coreans Otherwise they wouldn't be the c people.
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Mar 28, 2015 09:12
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Been meaning to link this, next time Atlantischat came around.quote:When the mythical island of Atlantis submerged into the ocean, it took all of its orichalcum with it. The legendary cast metal was reputedly second only to gold in value. A team of divers say they’ve recovered 39 blocks of orichalcum in a sixth-century shipwreck on the seafloor near Sicily The hard-hitting facebook-covering coverage you expect from IFL Science
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Mar 30, 2015 06:21
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Patter Song posted:Back on topic...trivia question. Who was the last Roman Emperor to have a monument in the city of Rome? This is relevant to the Rome/Byzantine question.  This guy.
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Mar 30, 2015 18:38
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Finally, an authentic experience where you can Fight For The Glory of Rome
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Apr 2, 2015 16:57
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PittTheElder posted:Given the whole predestination thing, I don't really get why Calvinism didn't just descend into a breathing pile of debauchery. I probably don't understand predestination either. Ah, but if you descended into debauchery, you were never part of the Elect all along.
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Apr 8, 2015 07:20
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Flipped to Olympus on scifi. Literally the first thing I see is a mention that a goddess is symbolized by an 'ear of corn'. I'm not sure what else I was expecting.,
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Apr 17, 2015 07:38
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Ah yiss, look at that hot mermaid
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Apr 17, 2015 16:41
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Blue Star posted:How literally did people take their polytheistic religions and myths? According to Greek mythology, the gods lived on Mount Olympus. But there's a real Mount Olympus and obviously there were no actual gods on it, so what did ancient Greeks think? Same goes for the River Styx: it's supposed to separate our world from Hades but again, it's obviously just a plain ol' river. Also, did people really believe in hydras, cyclopses, satyrs, whatever? Not too seriously!
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Apr 18, 2015 06:57
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Baudolino posted:Did no one in ancient Greece question if the Oracle of Delphi was actually seeing the future or just tripping on fumes? The tripping on fumes idea has been discarded by most historians anyway. But on the subject of ancient Mediterranean hallucinogens, dream fish are kinda neat. Tunicate fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Apr 18, 2015 |
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Apr 18, 2015 15:28
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Phobophilia posted:Someone please post the xbox live screengrab of someone going "your so gay you even kiss girls" Was browing the openbook thread, stumbled across it. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3305372&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=10#post376975585
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May 5, 2015 03:03
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The Roman Empire fell when Augustus died, as there was no successor worthy to follow in his footsteps.
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May 6, 2015 07:31
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Tao Jones posted:I think Julius Caesar won the ancient world fame game. You can ask practically anyone who Julius Caesar was and at least get "oh, the Roman guy, they stabbed him". But if you ask who Cicero was, you maybe get Latin students, and if you ask who Clodius Pulcher was, well, forget it. Herostratus 
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May 9, 2015 01:38
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Our society today is well rooted in the traditions of Athens
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May 12, 2015 00:31
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Grand Fromage posted:If you have an answer, you'll probably get a Nobel prize. This is a big area Noam Chomsky writes in, for some reading suggestions. Here's my general understanding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language is probably the best example we have.
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May 26, 2015 18:02
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HEY GAL posted:Not even--all you can judge is their aesthetic choices, their preferred literary style. To turn around from literature to making arguments about brain structure isn't even wrong, it's so out there. Well, you actually can tell if someone is severely schizophrenic based on what they write. yvette's bridal, for instance. Thing is, those don't look anything like ancient literature.
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May 27, 2015 15:55
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Ynglaur posted:Here, I'll tell you how it ends: he gets captured and sold into slavery.. You forgot War of the Worlds.
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May 29, 2015 01:05
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Pompeii would still be around if they hadn't been hotlinked.
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May 30, 2015 07:33
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IIRC, the Colosseum had all the women crammed into some subprime seating.
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May 31, 2015 06:58
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Egyptian doctors were also considered super great, though.
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Jun 24, 2015 01:08
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homullus posted:If I remember rightly, though, it was a super mixed bag. Like, they figured some positive consequences of honey being anaerobic, but then would also put mouse droppings in something else. The Edwin Smith papyrus shows that at least some of it was pretty advanced. I've heard that sending a guy an Egyptian doctor was pretty significant when conducing diplomacy.
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Jun 24, 2015 05:51
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Josef bugman posted:
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/journey-into-the-opium-underworld/ because the stuff you used to smoke it was cool as poo poo.
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Jul 7, 2015 05:52
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Phobophilia posted:Having a big pit filled with grains and lots of guys with spears to guard it also helps with food security. It's not like hunter-gathering is naturally food-secure. If your foraging ground runs out and the next one along the line collapsed for some reason, you're pretty hosed unless you have enough food to get to the next-next foraging area along the line. The biggest issue for hunter/gatherer populations is seasonal food bottlenecks. If your population is capped by what can be foraged in the dead of winter, you'll spend most of your life with way more food available than you can eat.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:50
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Obligatory Dinosaur Comic
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Jul 30, 2015 21:30
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Letters to the king of mari is a pretty fun skim. Just a big pile of ancient tweets.
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Aug 2, 2015 04:46
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From Philogelos 242. A man with bad breath is constantly looking to the heavens and saying lots of prayers. After a quick, baleful glance at him, Zeus calls down, ‘Have a little mercy! You’ve got gods in the underworld, too, you know!’
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Aug 18, 2015 23:29
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Friendly Tumour posted:Well it's a question of perspectives, but actually we understand brain function quite well! As a graduate student specifically studying the brain, no we really don't. EDIT: I mean unless you know all the answers to really obvious questions like 'why do people need to sleep', even before we get into detailed investigation on specific regions, in which case I'm all ears.
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Aug 19, 2015 18:09
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Friendly Tumour posted:I was mostly talking about how neurons function and how columns work. Point being that there isn't really anything mystical about brains. I mean yeah, we can't map them efficiently and we can't really figure out how individual neural nets are connected (also known as people), but we can definately say that we know much genetics influences the functioning of individuals. Yes, genetics affects us through how it alters the functioning of individual neurons and how brain regions are formed during foetal and infantile periods, but once it gets going a brain is essentially independent from genetics insofar as individual columnar units are concerned. The column model is a horrible oversimplification 
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Aug 19, 2015 18:27
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Dalael posted:I dont know. I always thought that "catch this" on a bomb or mortar round was really clever. I think they've found "catch!" on sling bullets too. Tunicate fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Aug 21, 2015 |
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Aug 21, 2015 18:37
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