Hedningen posted:

Georg Brandes, the leader of the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, was famed for both his lectures and his numerous, repeated affairs. After breaking it off with Victoria Benedictsson and giving her latest novel a poor review, she killed herself by slitting her throat with a razor in front of a mirror in a hotel. That suicide was the inspiration for the suicide in Strindberg's Miss Julie.

Hedningen posted:

Okay, that's drat cool. Mind if I use the picture for some of the materials I keep as a primer to theatre groups performing Miss Julie?

Lord Lambeth posted:

Humans have found farts amusing for hundreds of years

The Mentalizer posted:

You're loving with me, right? I'm not really familiar with your posting so I can't tell if you're being serious or not.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

I think my favorite thing about ancient fart jokes and dong-related art is that it pretty strongly says all of that "kids these days, I tell you" poo poo is actually pretty stupid. Suggesting that the new generation is somehow single-handedly destroying the world by laughing at farts and penises is dumb. Humans have been laughing about farts and sex for as long as there has been humans. History has a pretty long record of how we've pretty much always been that way and probably always will be.

Alhazred posted:

On the tombstone of a gladiator named Urbicus, who died at age 23 after 13 fights, it is written: "I warn you to kill those whom you have defeated". On the tombstone of the gladiator Diodorus it is written: "After breaking my opponent Demetrius I did not kill him immediately. Fate and the cunning treachery of the summa rudis killed me." (Summa rudis was the referee).

Phyzzle posted:

I've often wondered about archaeological focus points, like king Tut. Like the idea that our ancestors were 'cave men'. Do you know how freaking hard it is to find a cave that you can live in? The reason our ancestors were 'cave men' is because we find their remaining art and tools where they could be preserved, which is in caves.

There were references to "The Hundred Schools of Thought", including Confucianism, that were wiped out by the Qin dynasty. Later, the Analects of Confucius were found embedded in an ancient wall somewhere, and I remember reading that this coincidence was a big reason for his lasting influence.

Gorilla Salad posted:

Snapchat A Titty posted:

Kennel posted:

Thank god for typewriters & computers.

FreudianSlippers posted:

If you were a goy and weren't already in a concentration camp for dissidents by the start of the war you were probably at least a bit of a Nazi. Like Naziish.

Unless you were in the resistance, secretly saving Jews or part of of one of those plots to assassinate Hitler. In the last case you might even still be a bit of a Nazi.

hard counter posted:

Speaking of Charlemagne there's a theory with some traction that his aggressive Christianizing of Europe led to the Viking Age. Some Franks high on zeal burn down some Norse temples in lower Denmark and the local Vikings go on a revenge raid or two and figure out that Christian churches are both rich and easy pickings, thus leading to a medieval gold-rush of sorts. At the very least Charlemagne's proselytizing by sword would have raised tensions contributing to Norse aggression.

Captain Postal posted:

You can't mention that without mentioning Visingsö

On the Swedish island of Visingsö there’s a mysterious forest of oak trees; mysterious because oak trees aren’t indigenous to the island. The origin of the forest was unknown until 1980 when the Swedish Navy received a letter reporting that their requested lumber was ready.

The Navy didn’t know what the letter was on about, so they checked their records and it was discovered that in 1829 they had predicted a supply shortage of oak for warship building in the 21st century, and had ordered 20,000 oak trees to be planted in anticipation.

goose fleet posted:

It makes you wonder what they fought about, and if it was really worth dying over, considering that thousands of years later nobody has any idea why they did it

Captain Postal posted:

Unless you do a DNA test and find that the local population of 5,000,000+ people are related to tribe B and none to tribe A, then it sounds like it was wildly successful. A dead neighboring tribe doesn't compete for food.

Nessus posted:

Sounds like the doctrine of "total depravity" to me!

joshtothemaxx posted:

But is there a difference between "camp" and "homosexual" in mid-nineteenth century America?

ToxicSlurpee posted:

People always complain about how juvenile humor is these days and how everybody needs to grow up and stop telling rancid jokes. I'm sure we've all heard it as long as we've been alive; somebody bitching about how awful things are now and pointing to dirty humor as proof.

Shakespeare's works contain a "your mom" joke. One of the oldest written jokes found in English was a dick joke. In an old Viking epic one of the heroes is cursed with a penis so huge he couldn't have sex with his wife anymore.

Pick posted:

Still weak compared to the Norse.

nimby posted:

Do you have to take into account the preference for incest amongst the European nobility?

Aesop Poprock posted:

Isn't there a huge debate as to whether Confucius even existed as a singular/actual person, let alone had a traceable ancestory?

goose fleet posted:

So basically all of them

Ensign Expendable posted:

Getting a little nick on the edge of your blade isn't really critical damage for a sword. You can still cut up dudes just as well with it after.

hard counter posted:

In a related fact, the vikings were in a similar position where readily accessible local sources of ore were of the lovely bog iron variety (in their case) so they coped with advanced forging techniques that were comparable to the blast furnaces of later periods. Since they had plenty of coal they did not need to meticulously layer their product. Once in a while a norse trader would come back from Persia with ore /iron of high quality and those, coupled with the aforementioned advanced forging techniques, produced some great weapons for the period. There was a documentary a few years ago about a particular maker of them (with a Frankish name iirc) but it was mostly a speculative piece about the manufacture techniques than a reconstructive history.

goose fleet posted:

A rather forceful blowjob

SeanBeansShako posted:

So how about that interesting history stuff goons?

FreudianSlippers posted:

Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Sami, Meadow Mari, Hill Mari, Khanty, Mansi, Komi and probably a bunch of ones I'm forgetting are all Finno-Ugric languages and not at all related to the Indo-European languages.

I'm also not a linguist and probably a bit full of poo poo somehow.

BJPaskoff posted:

This just popped in my head from a conversation I overheard, maybe someone can clear this up: I've heard that everything we know about the ancient druids basically comes from people who hated/destroyed them, and their own historical records either never existed or were completely eradicated. And anyone who follows the "druidic religion" is practicing something cobbled together out of fantastical myths.