I learned in a Latin Studies class (with a chill white dude professor) that when the Europeans first saw Aztec cities they were stunned by the grid. The Aztecs had city planning and that there was no rational lay out to European cities at the time. No organization.
When the Spanish first arrived in Tenochtitlan (now downtown mexico city) they thought they were dreaming. They had arrived from incredibly unsanitary medieval Europe to a city five times the size of that century’s london with a working sewage system, artificial “floating gardens” (chinampas), a grid system, and aqueducts providing fresh water. Which wasn’t even for drinking! Water from the aqueducts was used for washing and bathing- they preferred using nearby mountain springs for drinking. Hygiene was a huge part if their culture, most people bathed twice a day while the king bathed at least four times a day.
Located on an island in the middle of a lake, they used advanced causeways to allow access to the mainland that could be cut off to let canoes through or to defend the city. The Spanish saw their buildings and towers and thought they were rising out of the water. The city was one of the most advanced societies at the time.
Anyone who thinks that Native Americans were the savages instead of the filthy, disease ridden colonizers who appeared on their land is a damn fool.
An Exotic Dancer Demonstrates That Her Underwear Was Too Large To Have Exposed Herself, After Undercover Police Officers Arrested Her In Florida
Dorothy Counts – The First Black Girl To Attend An All-White School In The United States – Being Teased And Taunted By Her White Male Peers At Charlotte’s Harry Harding High School, 1957
Austrian Boy Receives New Shoes During WWII
Jewish Prisoners After Being Liberated From A Death Train, 1945
The Graves Of A Catholic Woman And Her Protestant Husband, Holland, 1888
A Lone Man Refusing To Do The Nazi Salute, 1936
Job Hunting In 1930’s
German Soldiers React To Footage Of Concentration Camps, 1945
Residents Of West Berlin Show Children To Their Grandparents Who Reside On The Eastern Side, 1961
Acrobats Balance On Top Of The Empire State Building, 1934
Mafia Boss Joe Masseria Lays Dead On A Brooklyn Restaurant Floor Holding The Ace Of Spades, 1931
Lesbian Couple At Le Monocle, Paris, 1932
The Most Beautiful Suicide – Evelyn Mchale Leapt To Her Death From The Empire State Building, 1947
The Remains Of The Astronaut Vladimir Komarov, A Man Who Fell From Space, 1967
Race Organizers Attempt To Stop Kathrine Switzer From Competing In The Boston Marathon. She Became The First Woman To Finish The Race, 1967
Harold Whittles Hearing Sound For The First Time, 1974
Nikola Tesla Sitting In His Laboratory With His “Magnifying Transmitter”
i want to share with you some of my favourite graffiti from Pompeii
“Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!“
“Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this.“
“We two dear men, friends forever, were here. If you want to know our names, they are Gaius and Aulus.“
“Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion.“
“On April 19th, I made bread.“
“
I have buggered men.“
“If anyone does not believe in Venus, they should gaze at my girlfriend.“
“It took 640 paces to walk back and forth between here and there ten times.“
“Chie, I hope your hemorrhoids rub together so much that they hurt worse than when they every have before!“
“Epaphra is not good at ball games.”
“Two friends were here. While they were, they had bad service in every way from a guy named Epaphroditus. They threw him out and spent 105 and half sestertii most agreeably on whores.“
“Secundus likes to screw boys.“
I’ve always loved these. Humanity has never fucking changed.
I can’t help but feel this is one of those things where we had actual documents saying “it was done with this and this”, and some old rich white guys looked at it and went “oh mirth, the ancients were so silly. They probably wrote this basic stuff down and the actual builders had Secret Techniques we need to Discover”
For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew – and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.
The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.
Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”
Sincerely, if the scientists had to do actual analysis like spectroscopy or whatever, kudos, and no flame. But swear to god, if all these years, we’ve had the recipes and there was just this fuckin institutional bias against just TRYING THE THING THEY SAID WOULD WORK, HELLFIRE AND DEMENTIA.
In this case, it was more they had roman writings saying what went into it but figured there was some secret because when they followed roman recipes it never turned out quite right.
Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that.
But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again.
It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt.
3000 years later and we have no damned clue where it was, simply because at the time it was so blindingly obvious that it was never written down.
Why do people never want to tell you their middle name like who gives a shit its not a nuclear launch code its your damn name
reblog with your middle name in the tags
Actually, the practice dates back to the reason we have middle names in the first place!
Some time around the dark ages, everyone believed in witchcraft and wizardry, like ya do. A big principle of magic was the idea of “true names.” If a spellcaster knew your full name, they could do whatever the hell they wanted to you. Of course, people didn’t want that, but there were enough people with the same first names that you had to give people your surname as well, to avoid confusion.
The solution? A secret name in the middle that you don’t tell anyone (unless you believe that they’re not able to do magic and/or you trust them enough that if they DID do magic, you’d be fine).
this is some death note shit
Is that why when a parent uses your full name (or even just first and middle name) when they’re angry with you, it feels like they just cast some serious mojo on your soul and you know you are in deep shit?
The Mayans had mastered water pressure and had fountains and toilets as early as 750 AD.
Aztecs had running water and sewage.
The Victorians In the mid-1800s were dying of cholera because they just dumped their raw shit in the river Thames. They wouldn’t shower for months at a time because they were afraid of the polluted water.
Incans had created aquaducts in the slopes of the vast Andes mountains to reach the emperor, cities and farmers who used agricultural terraces.
Mayans, Aztecs, and Incans were far more advanced than the savage Europeans.
They only conquered them because they were literally so fucking filthy that they accidentally wiped out most of the population with pathogens that the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incans had never encountered before
Europe knew those thing too (aquaducts, fountains, toilets, public baths, etc). In the Roman times they mostly used them. But then came Christianity and its crazy idea that water spread the illnesses… and so Europe sank into filth. So blame religion for this too.
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