Jewish people who type the word “god” as “g-d”: Do you think you can fool the big man upstairs with a technical work around? When he goes through your emails/texts/facebook posts after you die, you don’t think he’s gonna see that dash and think “this sneaky fuck here, enjoy h-ll.”
this thought comes from someone who has no idea how Judaism works, but okay.
People avoid writing out God’s name, because you aren’t ever allowed to destroy or desecrate something with God’s name on it – you have to bury it instead. That’s what a genizah is. The most well known is probably the Cairo Genizah. It’s a box where Jews can put anything with God’s name on it to ensure that it gets buried.
So obviously Jews do write out God’s name. In fact, it used to be traditional to mark the top of pages with God’s name as a kind of blessing or mark of honesty. That’s why there are so many miscellaneous texts in genizahs.
Judaism reads “do not use my name in vain” pretty literally as a command to revere and respect the Y-H-V-H name of God.
Most rabbis agree that this commandment only holds for the hebrew, so not typing out God is more something people do out of respect or as a nod to this tradition. Some people use G-d because they want to parallel the fact that the tradition was put in place for people who would be speaking and writing in hebrew or a very near identical language like Aramaic.
It’s a matter of respect, not a matter of “don’t do this or you will be punished.”
Besides, Judaism deals almost exclusively with punishment in life and Judaism very explicitly doesn’t have a clear and codified notion of עולם הבא (the world to come). And there is certainly no notion of hell.
Also, Judaism is not nearly that harsh in response to small mistakes. We have a holiday every year explicitly devoted to the idea that we all fuck up and that we need to ask forgiveness from each other and God (and during which God does all the judging – God doesn’t wait until after we die. It’s an active thing that can be constantly adjusted).
Maybe world religions is not the best topic of contemplation during your shower.
As a tangentially related note, the Cairo Genizah basically didn’t get emptied for like, a thousand years, and in the late 19th century historians started going through it and found all kinds of writing in Hebrew and Arabic about day-to-day Jewish life, trading activity, etc. throughout the Islamic world and Indian Ocean region, there’s even writings from famous people like Maimonides.There’s hundreds of thousands of manuscripts. Some of them have been translated and published and it’s really neat to look at if you’re into that kind of thing.
So this tradition gave us a historical treasure whose value cannot even be described.
As someone who originally trained as a social historian of the Medieval Period, I have some things to add in support of the main point. Most people dramatically underestimate the economic importance of Medieval women and their level of agency. Part of the problem here is when modern people think of medieval people they are imagining the upper end of the nobility and not the rest of society.
Your average low end farming family could not survive without women’s labour. Yes, there was gender separation of labour. Yes, the men did the bulk of the grain farming, outside of peak times like planting and harvest, but unless you were very well off, you generally didn’t live on that. The women had primary responsibility for the chickens, ducks, or geese the family owned, and thus the eggs, feathers, and meat. (Egg money is nothing to sneeze at and was often the main source of protein unless you were very well off). They grew vegetables, and if she was lucky she might sell the excess. Her hands were always busy, and not just with the tasks you expect like cooking, mending, child care, etc.. As she walked, as she rested, as she went about her day, if her hands would have otherwise been free, she was spinning thread with a hand distaff. (You can see them tucked in the belts of peasant women in art of the era). Unless her husband was a weaver, most of that thread was for sale to the folks making clothe as men didn’t spin. Depending where she lived and the ages of her children, she might have primary responsibility for the families sheep and thus takes part in sheering and carding. (Sheep were important and there are plenty of court cases of women stealing loose wool or even shearing other people’s sheep.) She might gather firewood, nuts, fruit, or rushes, again depending on geography. She might own and harvest fruit trees and thus make things out of that fruit. She might keep bees and sell honey. She might make and sell cheese if they had cows, sheep, or goats. Just as her husband might have part time work as a carpenter or other skilled craft when the fields didn’t need him, she might do piece work for a craftsman or be a brewer of ale, cider, or perry (depending on geography). Ale doesn’t keep so women in a village took it in turn to brew batches, the water not being potable on it’s own, so everyone needed some form of alcohol they could water down to drink. The women’s labour and the money she bought in kept the family alive between the pay outs for the men as well as being utterly essential on a day to day survival level.
Something similar goes on in towns and cities. The husband might be a craftsman or merchant, but trust me, so is his wife and she has the right to carry on the trade after his death.
Also, unless there was a lot of money, goods, lands, and/or titles involved, people generally got a say in who they married. No really. Keep in mind that the average age of first marriage for a yeoman was late teens or early twenties (depending when and where), but the average age of first marriage for the working poor was more like 27-29. The average age of death for men in both those categories was 35. with women, if you survived your first few child births you might live to see grandchildren.
Do the math there. Odds are if your father was a small farmer, he’s been dead for some time before you gather enough goods to be marrying a man. For sure your mother (and grandmother and/or step father if you have them) likely has opinions, but you can have a valid marriage by having sex after saying yes to a proposal or exchanging vows in the present (I thee wed), unless you live in Italy, where you likely need a notary. You do not need clergy as church weddings don’t exist until the Reformation. For sure, it’s better if you publish banns three Sundays running in case someone remembers you are too closely related, but it’s not a legal requirement. Who exactly can stop you if you are both determined?
So the less money, goods, lands, and power your family has, the more likely you are to be choosing your partner. There is an exception in that unfree folk can be required to remarry, but they are give time and plenty of warning before a partner would be picked for them. It happened a lot less than you’d think. If you were born free and had enough money to hire help as needed whether for farm or shop or other business, there was no requirement of remarriage at all. You could pick a partner or choose to stay single. Do the math again on death rates. It’s pretty common to marry more than once. Maybe the first wife died in childbirth. The widower needs the work and income a wife brings in and that’s double if the baby survives. Maybe the second wife has wide hips, but he dies from a work related injury when she’s still young. She could sure use a man’s labour around the farm or shop. Let’s say he dies in a fight or drowns in a ditch. She’s been doing well. Her children are old enough to help with the farm or shop, she picks a pretty youth for his looks instead of his economic value. You get marriages for love and lust as well as economics just like you get now and May/December cuts both ways.
A lot of our ideas about how people lived in the past tends to get viewed through a Victorian or early Hollywood lens, but that tends to be particularly extreme as far was writing out women’s agency and contribution as well as white washing populations in our histories, films, and therefore our minds eyes.
Real life is more complicated than that.
BTW, there are plenty of women at the top end of the scale who showed plenty of agency and who wielded political and economic power. I’ve seen people argue that the were exceptions, but I think they were part of a whole society that had a tradition of strong women living on just as they always had sermons and homilies admonishing them to be otherwise to the contrary. There’s also a whole other thing going on with the Pope trying to centralized power from the thirteenth century on being vigorously resisted by powerful abbesses and other holy women. Yes, they eventually mostly lost, but it took so many centuries because there were such strong traditions of those women having political power.
Boss post! To add to that, many historians have theorised that modern gender roles evolved alongside industrialisation, when there was suddenly a conceptual division between work/public spaces, and home/private spaces. The factory became the place of work, where previously work happened at home. Gender became entangled in this division, with women becoming associated with the home, and men with public spaces. It might be assumable, therefore, that women had (have?) greater freedoms in agrarian societies; or, at least, had (have?) different demands placed on them with regard to their gender.
(Please note that the above historical reading is profoundly Eurocentric, and not universally applicable. At the same time, when I say that the factory became the place of work, I mean it in conceptual sense, not a literal sense. Not everyone worked in the factory, but there is a lot of literature about how the institution of the factory, as a symbol of industrialisation, reshaped the way people thought about labour.)
I am broadly of that opinion. You can see upper class women being encouraged to be less useful as the piecework system grows and spreads. You can see that spread to the middle class around when the early factory system gears up. By mid-19th century that domestic sphere vs, public sphere is full swing for everyone who can afford it and those who can’t are explicitly looked down on and treated as lesser. You can see the class system slowly calcify from the 17th century on.
Grain of salt that I get less accurate between 1605-French Revolution or thereabouts. I’ve periodically studied early modern stuff, but it’s more piecemeal.
I too was confining my remarks to Medieval Europe because 1. That was my specialty. 2. A lot of English language fantasy literature is based on Medieval Europe, often badly and more based on misapprehension than what real lives were like.
I am very grateful that progress is occurring and more traditions are influencing people’s writing. I hate that so much of the fantasy writing of my childhood was so narrow.
Wanna reblog this because for a long time I’ve had this vague knowledge in my head that society in the past wasn’t how people are always assuming it was (SERIOUSLY VICTORIANS, THANKS FOR DICKING WITH HOW WE VIEW EVERYTHING HISTORICAL). I get fed up with people who complain about fantasy stuff, claiming “historical accuracy” to whine about ethnic diversity and gender equality and other cool stuff that lets everyone join in the fun, and then I get sad because the first defence is always “it’s fantasy, so that doesn’t matter.”
I mean, that’s a good and valid defence, but here you have it; proof fucking positive that historical accuracy shows that equality and diversity are not new ideas and if anything BELONG in historical fiction. As far as I can tell, most people in the past were too bloody busy to get all ruffled up about that stuff; they had prejudices, but from what little I know the lines historically drawn in the sand were in slightly different places and for different reasons. (You can’t trust them furrigners. It’s all pixies and devil-worship over there).
So next time someone tells you that something isn’t “historically accurate” because it’s not racist/sexist/any other form of bigotry for that matter-ist enough for their liking, tell them to shut the hell up because they clearly know far less about history than they do about being an asshole.
Awesome.
THIS POST LIFTS ME UP
IT GIVES ME LIFE
MORE LIFE THAN I’VE EVER HAD
IT’S ALL I’VE GOT
IT’S ALL I’VE GOT IN THIS WORLD
AND IT’S ALL THE POST I NEED
Also an important thing to note for the people who like to think “back when we were cavemen men were in charge” if you actually look at human biology that doesn’t stack up. In social mammals, the only ones who undergo menopause are those with matriarchal groups. Menopause allows older females to take a break from breeding and looking after young and solely focus on being a leader and looking after the social group. If we stop looking at historical evidence through the lens of “men are physically stronger cuz testosterone so they must have been in charge” we might make more sense of the lives our ancestors lived. (Also physical strength doesn’t always mean leadership, even in the animal kingdom. Look at ants for a great example. Majors serve a certian role in the colony where their strength is required. But that doesn’t mean they’re in charge)
Is there any word that’s had a wilder evolutionary path than “gothic”?
Seriously, it went from meaning this:
to this:
to this:
and finally ended up as this:
You go you funky word, keep on trucking.
There’s a good reason for that!!!
Here’s an explanation literally no one asked for, and OP probably already knows, but I like talking about all my hyperfixations, and this covers like four of them. (Now, I’m going off the top of my head and its been a few years since I took an art history class) but the jist of it is that the “new” cathedral style that ended up being called Gothic, was called so, because the flying buttresses and pointed arches, and other pointy, overdramatic details were considered kind of barbaric compared to the older style. I want to say this was the point where cathedrals went from being ‘ornate’ to ‘dear god what the fuck are you even doing?!”
So basically we have gothic as this word that means, big and old and overdramatic and vaguely threatening. Which goes perfectly with the mood needing to be set by authors who place characters dealing with a crisis of faith, or a crisis of morality, in this big old mouldering expansive tomb of a house that represents everything of the distant past and the dark secrets rotting the foundations of polite society. But…the Victorians worshipped the austere version of the greeks and neoclassical, and all that neat white marble. But also an austerity as far as people went, there was this Christian ideal to aspire to.
So the decrepit tomb aesthetic, the doom and gloom and the decaying manor house, The Fall of Usher thing, it was popular for the same reason anything creepy is popular now. That love for the morbid and forbidden has never not existed. I mean…Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a best seller when it come out because it had all of the above and THEN some.
So far we’ve got Gothic as old and decaying and overdramatic and threatening but also kind of sexy (see gothic romances, or the use of gothic romance/gothic horror to explore Victorian fears and anxieties about sex and death and immorality).
Fast forward to the late 1970s when Siouxsie and the Banshees distilled that into a look and a performance. They were a punk band, but Siouxsie dressed like a vamp, she had the Theda Bara makeup and wore Victorian lingerie on the outside, but also fishnets and pointy boots. She was the femme fatale. She had the sex and death of both Vampira and Theda Bara, but her and the band had the theatrics of Screamin Jay Hawkins. A journalist described their music as gothic, as an insult, and exploded outward from there. But…they weren’t the sole band to be described this way, or necessarily the first to sound like that or dress like that. But they had enough of all these things to have that word linked to them. And their fans, and The Cure’s fans, and Sister’s of Mercy’s fans, and Bauhaus’ fans, created the subculture and look that we call Goth now. And much of the look has fanned out and expanded from years and years of the world’s most dramatic people trying to outdo each other at the club.
That’s how we got from A to B. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
So what you’re telling me is that “gothic” really just means “extra.”
Okay, 476 AD is when the original *ancient* Roman Empire finally went belly up. It is sorta-historically called the Western Roman Empire for about the last century or so of its existence because of the split of the Empire into Roman and *BYZANTINE* Empire (usually just referred to as Constantinople). They had actual names, but they were nicknamed East and West colloquially. When the west finally succumbed to the invasions, Constantinople continued to chug along.
Charlemagne is the one who “restored” the western side of the Roman Empire, but he specifically called it the Holy Roman Empire. Then he died and that brief period of “Hey Look, Rome!” went buh-bye as well.
Then Otto I, asshole son of Henry Fowler, rescued the pope of the Church in not-yet-Italy and said “Hey, if I solve your problems for you, you’ll make me Emperor, right?” The pope, being kind of fucking desperate at this point, made the mistake of agreeing. Otto I went out, kicked the utter shit out of the pope’s enemies, and came back saying “NOW, MOTHERFUCKER.” So the pope at the time (962 AD) declared Otto I of East Francia as the new Emperor of the *Roman Empire* which quickly became dubbed the Western Roman Empire, since Constantinople was seriously pissed off by this declaration and pretty much declared war on both Otto I and the papal states.
(Otto I is also the *direct* reason why the Church became the most politically powerful entity in Europe, which fucked up pretty much everything, but that is a different rant.)
Despite the fact that Otto’s heirs had the bad habit of dying really young in battle or just because Reasons, the Western Roman Empire kept its shit together for quite a while, but did not become known as the Holy Roman Empire until the 1200s, when everyone finally went along with the Saint Otto nonsense and went “Yep, totally Charlemagne’s Heir!” and that is why the various names of the varying Roman Empires is a complete clusterfuck.
In your copious free time I propose that you start a history vlog. Kinda like drunk history but more ‘had it up to here with this shite’ history.
…What copious free time?! DO YOU KNOW SOMETHING I DON‘T !??!!? WHERE IS THIS MYTHICAL EXTRA TIME, I NEED IT.
The sad thing is that there just are NOT that many useful resources set in that particular time period–which is fucking weird, because the late 900s is when the Western Roman Empire formed, and its founding changed literally fucking EVERYTHING about Europe. Every. Thing. Even finding Theodora’s lineage is difficult, which is screwed up, because she was a savvy bae of a political leader who was recognized as actual Empress while ruling as Regent for Otto III.
Then there is the lack of anything regarding Mac Bethan’s parents. MacBeth is a pretty popular motherfucker thanks to Shakespeare, and I’m having to pull his lineage all but out of my ass because there is nothing but a few names. I really do hate that I had to make up who Findlaech’s mother is, because wow, thanks, nobody wrote that down anywhere. Also, MacBeth had to be seriously fond of his parents, because when his idiot first cousins assassinated his father, MacBeth went to war and fucking destroyed them. He burnt one of them alive. His uncle fled Moray to avoid the same fate and had to hide in France for the rest of his life. Nobody knows if he was part of the conspiracy or not, but I imagine MacBeth probably was in the mood to slaughter first and ask questions later.
It’s really not taught, even in Scotland, that Moray was the most powerful kingdom at the end of the 10th century–not Alba. Alba was fucking tiny in comparison, even with some of the other kingdoms in the east saying, “Sure, we’ll call you our overlord!” Still tiny compared to Moray, whose king, Findlaech, was called the High King of the North. (Findlaech is a quiet badass and I love him.)
It’s a similar problem with Sigurd. The dude is a massively famous historical figure in Caithness and the Orkney Isles (or infamous, depending on where you are) for being a stubborn badass who took no shit from anybody ever, and yet people keep naming the wrong person as his mother. (And I mean they get it WAY wrong, genealogy fistfights levels of wrong.) The most I managed to find out about the Skullsplitter’s family, I uncovered through genealogy records, as most sites online don’t even list the names of Sigurd’s sisters, despite their political importance at the time. They also don’t bother to name his uncles, despite THEIR massive political importance at the time–they started a massive fucking war in the north that raged for 4 years just to figure out who would send a message to the king of Norway and say “Yeah, hey, I’m in charge now, he’s some stuff.” IIRC, Sigurd is also famous for being the Orkney Jarl to finally tell the King of Norway to fuck off and leave them alone, making them an independent kingdom for a while.
Genealogies are your friend. Tapestries and what artwork you can find of the period, also your friends. Dated maps of that time period are really fucking useful if you can find them, which uh, yeah, I had to build my own for Britain. Random bits of scholarly articles and rumors, also useful. If you can find documentaries about the Norse Viking age that aren’t complete piles of overdramatic, incorrect shit, then that is also helpful because the Viking Age shaped the political landscape of northern Europe. My bookmarks and file folders are full of reference material that I saved because I couldn’t fucking find it anywhere else.
Okay, 476 AD is when the original *ancient* Roman Empire finally went belly up. It is sorta-historically called the Western Roman Empire for about the last century or so of its existence because of the split of the Empire into Roman and *BYZANTINE* Empire (usually just referred to as Constantinople). They had actual names, but they were nicknamed East and West colloquially. When the west finally succumbed to the invasions, Constantinople continued to chug along.
Charlemagne is the one who “restored” the western side of the Roman Empire, but he specifically called it the Holy Roman Empire. Then he died and that brief period of “Hey Look, Rome!” went buh-bye as well.
Then Otto I, asshole son of Henry Fowler, rescued the pope of the Church in not-yet-Italy and said “Hey, if I solve your problems for you, you’ll make me Emperor, right?” The pope, being kind of fucking desperate at this point, made the mistake of agreeing. Otto I went out, kicked the utter shit out of the pope’s enemies, and came back saying “NOW, MOTHERFUCKER.” So the pope at the time (962 AD) declared Otto I of East Francia as the new Emperor of the *Roman Empire* which quickly became dubbed the Western Roman Empire, since Constantinople was seriously pissed off by this declaration and pretty much declared war on both Otto I and the papal states.
(Otto I is also the *direct* reason why the Church became the most politically powerful entity in Europe, which fucked up pretty much everything, but that is a different rant.)
Despite the fact that Otto’s heirs had the bad habit of dying really young in battle or just because Reasons, the Western Roman Empire kept its shit together for quite a while, but did not become known as the Holy Roman Empire until the 1200s, when everyone finally went along with the Saint Otto nonsense and went “Yep, totally Charlemagne’s Heir!” and that is why the various names of the varying Roman Empires is a complete clusterfuck.
More fun facts about ancient Celtic marriage laws: There were no laws against interclass or interracial marriage, no laws against open homosexual relationships (although they weren’t considered ‘marriages’ since the definition of a marriage was ‘couple with child’), no requirement for women to take their husband’s names or give up their property, but comedians couldn’t get married
It’s Adam and Eve not Adam Sandler and Eve
I want to expound upon “comedians couldn’t get married” thing because it’s actually really interesting.
Satire was respected in Ancient Ireland. It was thought to have great power, enough to physically maim the subject one was making jokes about. Satirists could bring down kings with a witty enough insult. That was actually their original function. When the king didn’t do right by his people, a bard was supposed to compose a poem so scathing it would raise welts on the king’s skin to oust him (it was illegal for a “blemished” king to rule.) Unwarranted satire was considered a form of assault.
So what it boils down to is ancient Celts being like “These people are too dangerous to reproduce. DO NOT TRUST THEM WITH CHILDREN. EVER.”
Girls pose by a jail that recalls the witch trials of 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. Photo taken in 1945.
I recently learned that the water in Salem was contaminated with the fungus from which LSD is derived and a legitimate theory for the whole thing is that everyone in the town was tripping balls
This might be the greatest thing ive ever seen on the internet
We did a whole massive thing on this in history. I believe the fungus in question is called Ergot and it’s terrifying. It makes your muscles spasm so when they had seizures that was the reason, not because they were possessed. One woman had to be strapped to her bed, she was seizing so bad. And, like ‘theybuildbuildings’ said, it had the same effects as LSD; as soon as you touch it, let alone consume it, it messes with your entire system. The worst thing is, you practically always had a bad trip. Many complained about bugs crawling under their skin or monsters emerging from the shadows to scratch and bite at them until they were screaming. It was a horrendous thing and the worst part is, Ergot is still around. It grows on crops and, if your wheat isn’t properly treated, it can be eaten and you’ll most likely experience the same as the women of Salem.
god i love history
This is hella cool and almost correct…
The effects on the people of Salem were probably from consuming bread with the fungus in it, not from contaminated water. And apparently rye is way more commonly affected than wheat. In fact, often the members of the clergy were able to afford nicer bread made from wheat and thus were not as commonly affected.
You don’t go on a spasm-y trip just by touching it. You have to consume it for weeks, which results in chronic poisoning. ( If you stop eating it early enough, you may recover. So when people suffering from these “demonic possessions” took refuge in churches and stopped eating low-grade rye bread they were sometimes miraculously healed.
More interesting facts:
Ergot poisoning can result in convulsions & hallucinations, or it can cause gangrene, depending on which group of active alkaloids are present. (Horrifying, either way.) It killed a lot of people in Europe in the Middle Ages.
In Europe, often there was a strong correlation between wet summers (which provide ideal conditions for ergot) and reports of witchcraft/ possession. And in Norway and Scotland, records of witch persecution are only found in areas where rye was grown and used to make bread.
And I just learned right now that one author dude translated the word “Beowulf” as “barley-wolf” which could indicate a connection to ergot. The LSD-like effects could be a valid explanation for stories of Old Norse warriors going into the a sort of trancelike battle rage.
(this is exactly the kind of stuff my herbology medicinal plants class is about, it’s so cool omfg. we had a lecture on ergot last week.)
… is this like the one time I get to be like ‘well, I mean, I probably would have died for other reasons, but at least my celiac ass probably ain’t gonna die from RYE GANGRENE’
and here’s a reproduction of the statue with the colors restored
i honestly think that what we consider the height of sculpture in all of Western civilization being essentially the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit to be evidence of the potential merit of found art
“I tried coloring it and then I ruined it”
And you know what the funniest part is? The paint didn’t just wear off over time. A bunch of asshole British historians back in the Victorian era actually went around scrubbing the remaining paint off of Greek and Roman statues – often destroying the fine details of the carving in the process – because the bright colours didn’t fit the dignified image they wished to present of the the cultures they claimed to be heirs to. This process also removed visible evidence of the fact that at least some of the statues thus stripped of paint had originally depicted non-white individuals.
Whenever you look at a Roman statue with a bare marble face, you’re looking at the face of imperialist historical revisionism.
(The missing noses on a lot of Egyptian statues are a similar deal. It’s not that the ancient Egyptians made statues with strangely fragile noses. Many Victorian archaeologists had a habit of chipping the noses off of the statues they brought back, then claiming that they’d found them that way – because with the noses intact, it was too obvious that the statues were meant to depict individuals of black African descent.)
There’s a lot of good academic discussion about chromophobia in modern Western aesthetics and how it links to colonialism.
a couple of general points:
1) the reason the reconstructions here look like “the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit” is because they’re reconstructions. this is not actually what these statues looked like, and in my opinion they do roman art a massive disservice. the reason they look so “gaudy” (which is actually the exact same colonial attitude that led directly to the literal whitewashing of graeco-roman art, nice, very nice) is because the colours have been applied flat, with no shading or blending to give the impression of shadow. looking at contemporary roman portraiture, it’s clear that they did actually have quite a sophisticated grasp of shading and colouring, and to imagine that they would just suddenly forget how to do the dark bits when they were painting on stone is ludicrous. for context, this is a portrait of paquius proculo, a fresco from pompeii, dating from around 20-30AD, ten years earlier than that bust of caligula:
(also of interest in this regard are the fayum mummy portraits, dating from the second century AD; again, although they are of varying quality, the best of them demonstrate a clear understanding of shading. for example:
and, to be honest: do you really think a civilisation that produced this
just, what, didn’t get paint? these reconstructions are laughable, not because they’re colourful but because they’re presenting an incredibly sophisticated culture as unable to understand simple artistic concepts; something that i think itself contributes to the idea of colourfully painted statues being ‘silly’ and ‘gaudy’, which again is an incredibly colonially-influenced idea.
2) the reason graeco-roman statues are often missing the noses is because most excavated statues are generally missing the noses. they are fragile. the head of a statue is basically a football with details; the nose is the only protruding part and is comparatively narrow and thin (as opposed to, say, an arm or leg, which takes more force to break off but is still very much detachable, c.f the venus di milo) and is very, very easy to break off. although i am absolutely the last person to deny the racism that has been present in classics, the noses thing is really not a great example.
Many sculptures from antiquity were defaced during the early Christian period. During riots, Christian mobs would smash the noses off of ‘pagan’ sculptures, as they usually depicted pagan gods, or emperors, and depending on the sect, any depiction of a person could be considered ‘graven’.
The hotbed of Christian zealotry was Egypt. Throughout its time as a Roman, and then ‘Byzantine’ province during its early Christian history, the province proved practically unmanageable due to its Christian theological riots, with the majority of the population not following Constantinople’s doctrine and theological orders.
This Roman bust of Germanicus at the British Museum was defaced – nose smashed off – during a riot that would have taken place in late antiquity in Egypt, so, 400-500AD [also, note the cross etched into forehead]
Probably the most known example of this is the destruction of the Alexandrian Serapeum, a vast temple complex in Alexandria, Christian mobs tore the temple apart, destroying and looting, tearing it down brick by brick.
Another example, outside of Egypt, is the Nika Revolts in Constantinople. On its creation as a co-capital of the Roman Empire, an unfathomable amount of art and sculpture was brought to adorn the New Rome, and during the revolt, for the most part this cream of the classical crop was destroyed, again, by theological mobs.
After Egypt’s conquest during the Arab-Islamic conquests, this practice would have continued. In fact, theologically, many of Egypt’s Christian sects were more in line with Islamic theology than what became mainstream Christianity in both ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Catholic’ doctrine.
Basically, if you want to know what happened to sculptures from antiquity, Abrahamic faiths happened to them. We divorce classical and ancient sculptures from their meaning – we see them as history or art, but to the new faiths, they were graven images, they were pagan, and they were destroyed or defaced.
I like this version of the thread. It has actual history in it not just “Victorian assholes” did it (which this thread also seems to be the only thing I ever see about Victorians removing paint from statues).
Julius Caesar’s two most famous assassins, Brutus and Cassius, were the son and son-in-law, respectively, of a Roman noblewoman named Servilia. And Servilia and Caesar were fucking. Not just a one off thing, either. They were having an affair for literally decades. Everyone knew it. Why did everyone know? Well, one time Caesar and Cato, who was Servilia’s brother, were having a debate (catfight) in the Senate and a servant came in and passed Caesar a note. Cato jumps up, all indignant, and announces that Caesar is committing treason right in the middle of the Senate. See that treasonous note he just got handed? (Like I said, it was a catfight.) And Caesar is like, well Cato, here’s the treasonous note, how about we read it aloud to the Senate, huh? It was a love letter from Servilia. And that’s the story of how Caesar made Cato stand there and listen to the sexts Cato’s sister sent Caesar get read aloud in front of the whole Senate.
I’ve always been privately convinced (on no evidence whatsoever) that Brutus and Cassius killed Caesar because they were so fucking embarrassed that he was fucking their mother/mother-in-law.
Ej you can’t just drop all the goss and then say there’s more without sharing
Oh boy. I guess I can’t back out now, can I? Ok, let’s do this.
So Brutus’s great-grandfather was named Quintus Servilius Caepio and he was a completely shit person generally and got two entire armies massacred because he was an elitist shithead and wouldn’t work with someone he thought was low-class but anyway. He was on campaign and he captured this huge hoard of gold at this town called Tolosa and sent it back to the Roman treasury. But then the caravan carrying the gold was hijacked by bandits and it all disappeared. Surprise! Caepio hired the bandits himself and stole all the gold. People were (understandably) pissed.
I was actually wrong in the tags, it wasn’t Brutus’s grandfather, it was his great-uncle. Anyway, so Roman citizens were allowed to vote, but the other Italians, who made up like half of the Roman armies, weren’t technically citizens and couldn’t vote. Which annoyed them. So Brutus’s great-uncle, Marcus Livius Drusus, basically got all the Italians to swear an oath that they would do whatever he said if he could get them citizenship. And he almost managed it. Only historical example I can think of of someone trying to take over a country by expanding democracy. Drusus got assassinated pretty fucking fast.
And then there’s Cato, which, don’t get me fucking started. The dude tore out his own intestines with his bare hands because he hate Caesar so much. I am not fucking joking.
So Caesar fucked everything. Everything. This wasn’t a secret or anything. The dude (probably) fucked the King of Bithynia when he was like 20 and the king was like 80. He made a habit of seducing the wives of his political enemies just to be an asshole. When he held a triumphal march through Rome, his soldiers chanted “Home we bring the bald whore-monger, Romans lock you wives away.” Caesar was basically the embodiment of Big Dick Energy and he made sure everyone knew it.
So Clodia was like the tabloid sensation of her day. She had lots of affairs, maybe killed her husband, and then she got involved with this guy Caelius. Eventually they broke up, so Clodia got Caelius prosecuted for attempted murder. You know, like you do. I don’t have time to get into all the juicy details, but let’s just say it involved accusations of incest, gleeful slut-shaming, and Cicero’s wife being bizarrely jealous.
As for Antony and Curio, they were friends and Cicero at one point (after Curio was dead, if I remember correctly) accused Antony of having had an affair with Curio when they were young men. It’s not clear if this is true, because on the one hand, it’s totally believable (if Caesar was the embodiment of Big Dick Energy, Antony was the embodiment of just Big Dick. Like, he had a really big dick and he liked to show it off to everyone) but on the other hand, Cicero hated Antony and was talking all kinds of shit about him at the time, so who the fuck knows.
Anyway, please buy my Roman tabloid, because the next issue will discuss that time Clodius dressed up in drag to sneak into Caesar’s house and Caesar’s mother organized all the Roman noblewomen to hunt him down.
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