Tag: history

A Smorgasbord of History Fun Facts

lookninjas:

seldnei:

sensiblydeluded:

Here’s another from the History Secret
Santa Archive! For today, rather than sort of getting into a longer,
more in depth description of some historical event or person, I
thought it would be fun to mix things up a bit, and just give you a
bunch of amusing little snippets. I hope you all like them!

The emperor Domitian, the last of the
Flavian dynasty in the Roman Empire, was a) not a very well-liked
ruler and b) very paranoid about assassination. After executing
random senators, sexual debauchery, and indulging in weird
psychological torture involving a meal of all black food in a totally
black room, a freedman named Stephenus finally got Domitian alone and
stabbed him to death with the ruse of saying, seriously, something
along the lines of, “Emperor, I need to speak with you in private!
I have just learned of a conspiracy to assassinate you!”

Mithridates VI of Pontus, also called
Mithridates the Great, is most notable for waging an almost
successful war against Rome (no mean feat), and also being terrified
of being poisoned. Like some sort of Dread Pirate Robert’s times
1,000, this king spent most of his young adulthood eating small doses
of various poisons and building up his immunity to almost every known
toxin. In addition, he invented a supposedly universal antidote that
is still called mithridae
(one recipe includes
frankincese, myrhh, and
cinnamon!) Unfortunately, after Pompey defeated Mithridates in
battle, the Pontian king tried to commit suicide by poison, but found
he couldn’t turn off his immunity. He ended up dying by sword,
instead.

The
month February takes
its name from the februa,
or a cord of goat hide that specially selected men would use in a
religious festival to essentially smack fertility into women (or at
least, that’s how the Romans saw it). In the Lupercalia, the young
men chosen dressed in the
skins of recently slaughtered goats, and most sort of arranged these
skins into loincloths as best they could, so they could run around
the city whipping various women without flashing the entire city.
Marc Antony, however, did not care about modesty, basically at all,
and he participated in this festival, and, to make a long story
short, we have historical verification that at least one member of
the Second Triumvirate was VERY well endowed.

Laksmibai,
Queen of Jhansi, and instrumental figure in the Indian Rebellion of
1857, was awesome in many ways, but she was a particularly skilled at
horsemanship. She could apparently ride a horse no-handed, clutching
the bridle in her teeth to steer, and would often go into battle as
described, but swinging a sword in each hand.

Romulus,
the mythical founder of Rome, was probably named after the city, and
not vice-versa as the legend suggests. Many possible meaning for the
name exist, including the idea that the name may originate from
rumina, a descriptor
for what the hill of the original city may have reminded people of.
Rumina means “breast”
in early Latin.

The
16th
President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, apparently really
liked cats. At one point, after a big loss for the Union side in the
American Civil War, one of his generals kept trying to brief him on
how their troops could recover and what needed to be done, but
Lincoln kept getting distracted by some abandoned kittens he could
see in the background of the camp.  In the end, the general had to
promise that the kittens would be taken care of before the president
would focus on the aftermath of the battle.

Gaius
Octavian, later Augustus, was quite short, even
by Roman standards, and wore
platform shoes to make himself appear taller. And
speaking of Roman emperors, the process of deifying dead emperors had
become so common by the beginning of the Flavian dynasty that, on his
deathbed, the emperor Vespasian announced, “Oh dear. I think I’m
becoming a god.”

I’ve
seen varying historical opinions on this fact, but Romans may not
have generally learned to read silently. So, every time they, for
example, got a letter, they had to read it aloud. Julius Caesar
seemed to be one of very few people who could read silently, and this
ability apparently freaked people the hell out.

Suetonius,
an ancient Roman author who described the lives of the first twelve
emperors, as well as Julius Caesar, only had his works saved because
they’d all been thrown in to a well preserved garbage dump. The
complete works of Confucius were only preserved because someone hid
them in a wall. My personal favorite historical preservation story,
though, is that Christian monks apparently preserved the works of
Livy and Virgil
because they both wrote short poems about some awesome baby being
born soon that would end up saving the world. These passages were
later interpreted as being about Jesus, but, in reality, at the time
both Augustus’s and Marc Antony’s wives were pregnant, and both
writers were likely trying to butter up the two most powerful men in
Rome.

Marcus
Caelius, a prodigy of Cicero’s, was once working as basically a
prosecuting attorney in the case of a man believed to had poisoned
his wife. The defense argued
that the accused couldn’t have used the type of poison (aconite)
because it has distinct symptoms when consumed. Marcus Caelius argued
that aconite had fewer recognizable symptoms if absorbed via a, ahem,
different orifice. Such as the vagina. In the trial, Marcus Caelius
announced, presumably eyes blazing and pointing at the accused, “I
do not point the finger of guilt! I point at the guilty finger!”
essentially making a fingering joke in the middle of a SERIOUS MURDER
TRIAL.

I read most of this to Mr Seldnei this morning, and he quite enjoyed the Domitian story, replying with:  “I have uncovered a plot to kill you!  And it is me! Stabby stabby stabby.”

What I’ve taken from all this is that
Laksmibai,
Queen of Jhansi, is a lot like who I wish I was.  And Abraham Lincoln is a lot more like who I actually am.

Further evidence that humans have always been humans. 

wizardshark:

fizzy-dog:

tilthat:

TIL that carrots aren’t actually good for your eyes… it’s just a myth that the British government fabricated during WWII. They wanted to keep their newly developed radar system secret from the Germans and had to find some way to explain how they were suddenly shooting down a lot more planes.

via reddit.com

germany: how are you guys destroying our planes so easily?

british guy who’s about to invent the myth about carrots being good for your eyes: oh you haven’t heard?

the best part though is that the germans BELIEVED IT

Wait wait our idea of dirty medieval peasants is based on a *tax aversion scam*??? Please tell me more I need to know this. *bounces excitedly*

robstmartin:

brunhiddensmusings:

shortly after william the conquerer came to power he initiated something known as ‘the doomsday book’- he sent envoys to survey his new lands to record the properties he now controlled so they could pay accurate taxes. every acre of field, every mill, livestock, buildings and their relative size- all would be recorded to determine the wealth of each settlement so a percentage could be expected as rent. for an example of what this book meant;  the previous king was aware of and collected taxes from about 20 grain mills in england, william’s audit shot that number above 200. you dont know the meaning of ‘pedantic’ untill you start reading about medieval grain mills, theres a church that paved its floor with confiscated ‘illegal’ millstones to ensure that the town had to get its flour from the church’s official mill and one war simply about stealing the same millstone back and fourth for quite a few decades

of course word of these envoys traveled faster then they did, virtually every town they came to had time to claim they had far less taxable wealth then they actually did have by the time the audit arrived. in one of the more over the top cases an entire village pretended to have caught insanity- when the taxmen arrived they saw screaming laughing idiots with underwear on their heads so they left as fast as they could considering at the time insanity was thought to be literally contagious. it would be over five years before anyone tried to audit that town again. its safe to assume a large number of other villages also had sudden cases of strange diseases, mysteriously disappearing cows, or very large shrubberies and haybales shaped like buildings and you dont need to look over that hill either. thats not even touching how many small communities just plain didnt technically exist because they were too small, somewhere weird, or in legal limbo of who owned it

of course when the feudal part of feudalism started moving its gears you found that the local lord of that village was unlikely to divulge the exact amount of rents they could collect to THEIR lord either, knowing that the more they admitted to receiving the more they were expected to hand over. this was not exclusive to england either, the more you learn about feudalism the more you have to ask how all these minor lords out in the boonies kept having the money and soldiers to do all the political intrigue bullshit, the answer is also tax evasion. each village kept claiming it had fewer people living in shittier houses with less land and fewer livestock then they actually had, and each local lord kept claiming they were receiving less rents then they actually took so were also adverse to an accurate audit.

their knowledge of tax loopholes also extended to finding out that clergymen were either exempt from tax or received a far lower rate of tax, so proving you qualified as a clergyman was an endeavor that paid dividends. specifically to prove you were clergy you proved that you could read and write enough Latin to satisfy an official, so you could spend some money to hire someone to tutor you enough Latin to fake it. its estimated that due to this fully ten percent of medieval english households wrote ‘clergy’ on their tax forms.

another and even more extreme example was the peasants revolt of 1381, london was swarmed by the unwashed masses from all sides instigated by an official trying to collect (a lot of) unpaid poll taxes, an angry mob driving a teenaged king Richard II to retreat to a boat in the river, and culminating with 1500 peasants being executed by an emergency militia. this doesn’t sound like a huge success untill you dig into some of the details- peasants from a large number of villages all arrived at london at the same time, leaving dedicated forces specifically to stop ships from acessing london to break the siege, the peasants executed a select number of court officials and started burning paperwork- but systematically only burning the ones detailing who owned plots of land, debt records, and a few criminal records. the peasants who besieged london and scared the king into the river had successfully purged a whole lot of debts and reclaimed a lot of land in one very ballsy and highly coordinated move that relied on them being seen as illiterate dirt farmers with no ulterior motives besides pitchfork mob riot and trying to kiss the queen mother while they touch everything in the tower of london with their grimy hands

found it. this is… this is amazing. I did a BA in Medieval British History and we never, ever, once considered this. Not once. At a major Canadian university.

jfc this changes my entire brain

brunhiddensmusings:

jeneelestrange:

incorrectdiscworldquotes:

tilthat:

TIL of the “Tiffany Problem”. Tiffany is a medieval name—short for Theophania—from the 12th century. Authors can’t use it in historical or fantasy fiction, however, because the name looks too modern. This is an example of how reality is sometimes too unrealistic.

via reddit.com

“Authors can’t use it in fantasy fiction, eh? We’ll see about that…”

–Terry Pratchett, probably

Try to implement anything but a conservative’s sixth grade education level of medieval or Victorian times and you will butt into this. all. the. time. 

There was a literaly fad in the 1890′s for nipple rings for all genders(and NO, it was NOT under the mistaken belief that it would help breastfeeding–there’s LOTS of doctors’ writing at the time telling people to STOP and that they thought it would ruin the breast’s ability to breastfeed well, etc). It was straight up because the Victorians were freaks, okay
Imagine trying to make a Victorian character with nipple rings. IMAGINE THE ACCUSATIONS OF GROSS HISTORICAL INACCURACY

people just really, REALLY have entrenched ideas of what people in the past were like

tell them the vikings were clean, had a complex democratic legal system, respected women, had freeform rap battles, and had child support payments? theyd call you a liar

tell them that chopsticks became popular in china during the bronze age because street food vendors were all the rage and they wanted to have disposable eating utensils? theyll say youre making that up

tell them native americans had a trade network stretching from canada to peru and built sacred mounds bigger then the pyramids of giza? you are some SJW twisting facts

ancient egypt had circular saws, debt cards, and eye surgery? are you high?

our misconception of medieval peasants being illiterate and living in poverty in one room mud huts being their own creation as part of a century long tax aversion scam? you stole that from the game of thrones reject bin

iron age india had stone telescopes, air conditioning, and the number 0 along with all ‘arabic’ numbers including algebra and calculus? i understand some of those words.

romans had accurate maps detailing vacation travel times along with a star rating for hotels along the way, fast food restaurants, swiss army knives, black soldiers in brittany, traded with china, and that soldiers wrote thank-you notes when their parents sent them underwear in the mail? but they thought the earth was flat!

ancient bronze age mesopotamia had pedantic complaints sent to merchants about crappy goods, comedic performances, and transgender/nobinary representation? what are you smoking?

minervafloofderg:

the-porter-rockwell:

mojave-wasteland-official:

anotherjadedwriter:

anotherjadedwriter:

history fucked me up

oxford was built and operational as a college before the rise of the mayans and cleopatra lived in a time nearer to pizza hut’s invention than to the pyramids being built

I need a noncomprehensive history book that covers Known World History in time periods, like “in this century, all this shit was happening concurrently” and not just all spread out so I have to piece it together like some unpaid uneducated scholar

Mongols were fighting Samurai in Japan and Knights in Europe at the same time. 

Star Wars a New Hope came out the same year as the last execution in France by Guillotine. 

Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allen Poe were friends in their early 20′s. 

When the Great Pyramids were being built there were areas that still had Woolly Mammoths roaming. 

Vikings and Inuits discovered Greenland at around the same time.

csykora:

sixpenceee:

The grave of Marie Taglioni, a ballerina who pioneered the en pointe style of dance. Young dancers often leave their dancing shoes on her grave.

to some of the comments I’ve seen on this—

Marie Taglioni had a different body from other dancers. Modern ballet dancers end up with ‘bad backs’ because we’re trying to reshape ourselves like her but we don’t talk about it.

Looking at that photo, you can see her sloped shoulders and bent-backwards posture. Her head and upper body look pretty relaxed, but if you try to draw a line down to her feet, there would have to be a deep bend in her lower back. That’s something she’s doing intentionally.

It’s unclear at this point whether Taglioni had scoliosis or some other atypical bone structure. It’s clear from portraits that she always had those rounded shoulders and when she stood naturally, the curve of her spine made her lean forward quite a bit, suggesting kyphosis. Although she came from a major ballet family, as a young woman she was repeated rejected by ballet teachers, who referred to her (apparently to her face) as “that little hunchback”.

Training on her own with her father, she developed a way to tuck in her lower back, raising her arms above her head, which lifted up her ribcage so she looked…kind of more like a typically-bodied person.

But it didn’t really make her look like everybody else. Apparently, the posture (and the hours a day, every day, she spent building the strength to hold it with ease) made her look eerily weightless compared to other dancers at the time. To add to the effect, she built up her calf and ankle strength until she could dance for long periods en pointe, which had previously been a very occasional stunt (which involved a lot of arm-flapping, trying to balance. Her statuesque still arms and sheer strength made it look good for the first time).

Her father choreographed the first Romantic ballets, all about faeries and ghostly maidens, to showcase her floating look. She wore knee-length skirts to showcase her gnarly calves and awesome footwork.

 When La Sylphide debuted in the spring of 1832, Paris was boiling up toward the June Rebellion (you know, all that in Les Mis). Her scandalous skirts and the dark, haunting sentiment of her dances spoke to the wonder and grandeur and fear Parisians were feeling as they questioned the fundamental order of their world. (She made Parisian teens feel like you feel when you listen to Les Mis.) She was a big fuckin’ hit, performing in the same Paris Opéra that had refused to enroll her as a student.

You know that most basic image of what a “ballerina” is? Arms up high in that pretty frame that starts to hurt real quick and your butt tucked in and your hips all weird? That position wasn’t part of the ballet canon before Taglioni.That’s us trying to make our bodies look like what Marie Taglioni made with her body because people were assholes to her.

Dancers started leaving shoes for her blessing, in a way asking how they can struggle to do what she made seem natural. 

That’s us still telling most people they don’t have “the right body for ballet” while we tell the few people who do that they still aren’t enough, because we want people to look perfectly aesthetically able-bodied while doing the thing that a non-normatively bodied woman created for herself. 

I’m not saying able-bodied people can’t dance! But hey, maybe we should think about it before we tell anyone they have to dance or be shaped one way.

(In case you’re wondering, it’s not clear if she’s really buried at the be-shoed grave in Montmartre or if that’s her mama. So that’s one of a couple reasons we can’t figure out whether she had a particular condition.)

Source: sixpenceee

fuckyeah-nerdery:

lord-kitschener:

terrasigillata:

shitface54:

museum-of-artifacts:

Reconstruction of bust of Roman emperor Caracalla.

Looks Middle Eastern/ African maybe even Greek. Interesting post.

His father, the emperor Septimius Severus, was North African (the first African emperor of Rome!), and his mother, Julia Domna, was Syrian, from a wealthy priestly family

#rome was a multiethnic empire

#there was literally an emperor named philip the arab

Source: museum-of-artifacts

Unlikely simultaneous historical events

summercicada:

seasonsmayklaine:

quantumblog:

jkottke:

A poster on Reddit asks: What are two events that took place in the same time in history but don’t seem like they would have?

Spain was still a fascist dictatorship when Microsoft was founded.

There were no classes in calculus in Harvard’s curriculum for the first few years because calculus hadn’t been discovered yet.

Two empires [Roman & Ottoman] spanned the entire gap from Jesus to Babe Ruth.

When the pyramids were being built, there were still woolly mammoths.

The last use of the guillotine was in France the same year Star Wars came out.

Oxford University was over 300 years old when the Aztec Empire was founded.

Pablo Picasso died the year Pink Floyd released “Dark Side of the Moon” (1973) 

Prisoners began to arrive to Auschwitz a few days after Mc’Donalds was founded. 

Coca-Cola is only 31 years younger than Italy. 

Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth II were born in the same year. 

The Ottoman empire still existed the last time the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.

WEIRD

pitbullmabari:

ceescedasticity:

systlin:

fourthage:

rabbittiddy:

robotsandfrippary:

brunhiddensmusings:

fenrisesque:

lizawithazed:

ultrafacts:

Onfim was a child who lived in Novgorod, Russia, in the 13th century. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark (beresta) which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod. Onfim, who archaeologists believe was six or seven at the time, wrote in Old Novgorodian; besides letters and syllables, he

drew battle scenes and drawings of himself, his family, and his teacher.

[x]

Here is a picture of him as a knight stabbing someone.

image
image

(At least, he wrote his name next to the knight. Either it was supposed to be him or he was signing his masterpiece. Either way, still adorable.)

Several pictures of the original birch pieces can be found here:

 [x]

(Fact Source) For more facts, follow Ultrafacts

“people have always been people”

i’ve seen similar ones from roman children living in what is now england, too. People have ALWAYS been people.

i love this so much, history with real people in it

see also
-archeologists at hadrians wall dig up a letter from a roman soldier to his family tanking them for sending him a new pair of underwear in the mail
-norse runes scattered around constantanople and several cathedrals turn out to be viking graffiti, including “this is very high” over two stories up
-the oldest known joke (egyptian) and the oldest known english joke are both lowbrow sex jokes
-roman gladiators had equivalents to sponsorship deals, some murals found were basically ‘gladiator brad pitt rubs himself with capelli brand olive oil, try some today’ and action figures were also found of prominent fighters for chidlren to play with
-flat stone fragments left at egyptian construction sites were used as post it notes by workers, some included variations of ‘the foreman is a jerkface’ and a crude drawing of the pharoh with a comically large donger
-we have an embarrassing wealth of 4,000 year old receipts referring to one specific merchant being an ass. WE KNOW HIM BY NAME, he wasnt even a king or anything,
Ea-nasir  will be known through history for being a dick about refunds

I love how children, even in the 13th century, can never remember how many fingers someone has. 

Oh no Ea-Nasir strikes again.

You left out the best part about the Ea-Nesir receipts!  From the original post about this historic jackass:

The majority of the surviving correspondences regarding Ea-nasir
were recovered from one particular room in a building that is believed
to have been Ea-nasir’s own house.

Like, these are clay
tablets. They’re bulky, fragile, and difficult to store. They typically
weren’t kept long-term unless they contained financial records or other
vital information (which is why we have huge reams of financial data
about ancient Babylon in spite of how little we know about the actual
culture: most of the surviving tablets are commercial inventories, bills
of sale, etc.).

But this guy, this Ea-nasir, he kept all
of his angry letters – hundreds of them – and meticulously filed and
preserved them in a dedicated room in his house. What kind of guy does that?

Ea-nasir, the FUCKING LEGEND

Departing from Ea-nasir, reportedly there are surviving thirteenth century letters to students at the University of Paris saying things like “I’ve heard it’s cold, wear your scarf” or “I will not send you any money because I have been informed you never study but just sit around playing your guitar”.

what cracks me up about ea nasir is that despite all this, despite constant complaints, a clearly terrible reputation, not only did he keep all his angry letters, HE KEPT USING HIS NAME. HE DIDN’T GO TO A NEW TOWN WITH A NEW NAME, NO, HE STAYED PUT AND KEPT ON BEING EA NASIR

Source: ultrafacts