The History Thread

Looks good, anywhere online I can watch the whole thing?
 
Pompeii dig unearths fighting fresco in 'gladiators' tavern'

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/11/pompeii-dig-unearths-fighting-fresco-gladiators-tavern
 
The myth of the Mona Lisa

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Hilarious how so many male art critics reveal their misogyny by being terrifed and scornful of Lisa:
Walter Pater said:
She is older than the rocks among which she sits;
Like the vampire,
She has been dead many times,
And learned the secrets of the grave;
And has been a diver in the deep seas,
And keeps their fallen day about her
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/28/londonreviewofbooks
 
@esmufc07 this might interest you, five-part documentary on the history of the Jews by Simon Schama. The first episode deals with the ancient/classical history:









 
That's absolutely incredible @2cents. Always boggles my mind how they begin to try and translate something like that. I think I'm right in saying that the 'Rosetta Stone' moment for Akkadian and Sumerian was a trilingual inscription on the wall of a cliff in Iran. They managed to piece together the bit written in Old Persian using modern Persian and from that worked out the alphabet a lot of the ancient Mesopotamian languages used.
 
I previously posted this in the Book Thread but am posting it again as I'd like to recommend the book to all history lovers:

Queen of Fashion: what Marie Antoinette wore to the Revolution
(by Caroline Weber)

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I really didn't expect to be entertained by this book (it was recommended to me because of its good reputation) but it's excellent, and proves the author's main point: that a seemingly trivial matter - the Queen's choices in her style of dress and ornamentation - was actually massively important to her standing with not only fellow aristocrats but also the French public in general. Surprisingly, Weber convinced me that these choices were not, as I believed, an insignificant factor in the French monarchy's overthrow. For all Marie's famed superficiality and excess, it's incredible to read of the suffocating, relentless pressure she was subjected to from the moment she left her Austrian homeland for the French court...and what a horrible nest of vipers that was. If ever a royal court was ripe for revolution, it was this one, and Marie Antoinette was far from being the worst culprit:
At a time when a well-to-do noble family could live luxuriously on 30,000 livres a year, Madame Du Barry (the mistress of Marie's grandfather-in-law, King Louis XV) once spent 450,000 livres on a single bodice.
 
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Mongolia is a very beautiful country. Yes it's now Russianised in their script. But once you get out of Ulaanbaatar the country changes and the Steppes are amazing. Even the lifestyle is different and they live in the ger. In the winter it's too cold and so much pollution due to the smoke of fires.
 
I previously posted this in the Book Thread but am posting it again as I'd like to recommend the book to all history lovers:

Queen of Fashion: what Marie Antoinette wore to the Revolution
(by Caroline Weber)

51lNejQCcgL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg


I really didn't expect to be entertained by this book (it was recommended to me because of its good reputation) but it's excellent, and proves the author's main point: that a seemingly trivial matter - the Queen's choices in her style of dress and ornamentation - was actually massively important to her standing with not only fellow aristocrats but also the French public in general. Surprisingly, Weber convinced me that these choices were not, as I believed, an insignificant factor in the French monarchy's overthrow. For all Marie's famed superficiality and excess, it's incredible to read of the suffocating, relentless pressure she was subjected to from the moment she left her Austrian homeland for the French court...and what a horrible nest of vipers that was. If ever a royal court was ripe for revolution, it was this one, and Marie Antoinette was far from being the worst culprit:

Everything I've read or heard about the latter stages of the Ancien Régime (and honestly the rest of the contemporary European order too) has convinced me that the French Revolution was utterly good and justified. Even the Terror pales in comparison to events that were commonplace in Europe. I read that the Russians may have killed more Poles on a single day to crush an attempt to gain independence than were killed in the entirety of the Terror.
 
Everything I've read or heard about the latter stages of the Ancien Régime (and honestly the rest of the contemporary European order too) has convinced me that the French Revolution was utterly good and justified. Even the Terror pales in comparison to events that were commonplace in Europe. I read that the Russians may have killed more Poles on a single day to crush an attempt to gain independence than were killed in the entirety of the Terror.

When did the Russians kill so many Poles? Genuine question not a wind up.
 
When did the Russians kill so many Poles? Genuine question not a wind up.

I heard this in a history podcast years ago, so I can't quite remember the exact event. It's particularly hard since Poles have been fighting for independence rather often. It might have been this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Praga

Up to 20k killed, which is more than the number of executions in the Terror. It's not quite the same, of course (and it changes if you include the internal uprisings in France as part of the Terror), but it still serves well to make the point that the European order at the time was every bit as brutal as the revolutionaries ever were.
 
'Here be dragons':

 
Here's a video:


I'm surprised I've missed this story when the fossil was first displayed. Should have been a bigger story.
 
Anyone heard of Hero of Alexandria?

He was a Greek engineer and mathematician, born around 10 AD and was responsible to designing and building the first steam-powered device (aeolipile); of course, his work was kept in the Library of Alexandra, which unfortunately was destroyed presumably by Caesar. Why is this important? Because the next time that a device like this was built was in the 16th century by an Arabic engineer. That's how far ahead of his time he was. You couldn't even apply his theories to anything in society at that time, or for a long time. Had the Library of Alexandria have remained it's quite possible that the industrial era might have occurred centuries prior to the 19th Century.
 
Rio Tinto blasts 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site to expand iron ore mine
Mining company was given permission to blast Juukan Gorge cave, which provided a 4,000-year-old genetic link to present-day traditional owners

'One year after consent was granted, an archeological dig intended to salvage whatever could be saved discovered the site was more than twice as old as previously thought and rich in artefacts, including sacred objects.

Most precious was a 4,000-year-old length of plaited human hair, woven together from strands from the heads of several different people, which DNA testing revealed were the direct ancestors of Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura traditional owners living today.

But the outdated Aboriginal Heritage Act does not allow for a consent to be renegotiated on the basis of new information. So despite regular meetings with Rio Tinto, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) Aboriginal Corporation was unable to stop the blast from going ahead.'
 
@Carolina Red (or anyone else who might know), I’ve been looking for a good, comprehensive history of slavery in America and been recommended Without Consent or Contract by Robert Fogel. Any thoughts or alternative suggestions for a novice?
 
@Carolina Red (or anyone else who might know), I’ve been looking for a good, comprehensive history of slavery in America and been recommended Without Consent or Contract by Robert Fogel. Any thoughts or alternative suggestions for a novice?

Not a book but here there are a number of resources: https://www.societyofblackarchaeologists.com/resources

This might be of particular interest to you - https://slavevoyages.org/

It is a database of 35000+ voyages from the early 1500s to the late 1800s. Includes maps, images, essays, diaries etc. from both the enslaved and enslaver perspectives.
 
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Also these two books are pretty good regarding the narratives of Indigenous People in the USA and Canada and how to confront the legacies of racism and colonialism -

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

and

Surviving Canada: Indigenous Peoples Celebrate 150 years of Betrayal by Myra J. Tait and Kiera L. Ladner
 
@Carolina Red (or anyone else who might know), I’ve been looking for a good, comprehensive history of slavery in America and been recommended Without Consent or Contract by Robert Fogel. Any thoughts or alternative suggestions for a novice?
Time on the Cross and Without Consent are both really famous (and controversial in the case of Time) economic histories of slavery by him.

If you want to read a general history of slavery that isn't economic history, then I recommend The Peculiar Institution by Kenneth Stampp. Less than 500 pages long and provides a good overview from the 1600s up to Reconstruction looking at slavery from the perspective of the slave, slave owner, economics, social effects, etc.

For more specfic reading...
Bullwhip Days would be a must-read, in my opinion. It's a collection of first person accounts of slavery, commissioned by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. They interviewed 2300 remaining slavery survivors to make the book.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism is another one that is fantastic and focuses on how the modern American economy is intrinsically tied to the institution of slavery and the contributions made by those slaves.

Fall of the House of Dixie is a great social history of the Antebellum and Civil War era South.
 
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An enormous pyramid-topped platform, unnoticed until detected with the help of lasers, is the oldest and largest structure in the Maya region.

BY TIM VERNIMMEN


An enormous 3,000-year-old earthen platform topped with a series of structures, including a 13-foot-high pyramid, has been identified as the oldest and largest monumental construction discovered in the Maya region, according to a paper published today in the journal Nature. It’s the latest discovery to support the emerging view that some of the earliest structures built in the Maya region were significantly larger than those built more than a millennium later during the Classic Maya period (250-900 A.D.), when the empire was at its peak.

The discovery took place in Mexico’s Tabasco State at the site of Aguada Fénix, about 850 miles east of Mexico City. It is in a region known as the Maya lowlands, from which the Maya civilization began to emerge.

In 2017, researchers conducted a LiDAR survey that detected the platform and at least nine causeways leading up to it. The groundbreaking laser technology typically is used from aircraft to “see” structures beneath dense tree canopy below, but in this case it revealed a stunning discovery sitting unnoticed in plain sight in Tabasco’s semi-forested ranch lands for centuries, if not millennia.

So why was such a big monument at Aguada Fénix not identified earlier?
“It’s fairly hard to explain, but when you walk on the site, you don’t quite realize the enormity of the structure,” says archaeologist Takeshi Inomata of the University of Arizona, the lead author of the paper. “It’s over 30 feet high, but the horizontal dimensions are so large that you don’t realize the height.”

“Rituals we can only imagine”

The initial construction of the platform is believed to have began around 1,000 B.C. based on radiocarbon dating of charcoal inside the complex.
But the absence of any known earlier buildings at Aguada Fénix suggests that at least up until that period, the people living in the region—likely the precursors of the Classic Maya—moved between temporary camps to hunt and gather food. That has researchers speculating over how and why they suddenly decided to build such a massive, permanent structure.

Inomata estimates that the total volume of the platform and the buildings on top is at least 130 million cubic feet, meaning it is bigger even than the largest Egyptian pyramid. He also calculated that it would have taken 5,000 people more than six years of full-time work to build.

“We think this was a ceremonial center,” Inomata says. “[It’s] a place of gathering, possibly involving processions and other rituals we can only imagine.”

No residential buildings have been found on or around the structure, so it is unclear how many people may have lived nearby. But the large size of the platform leads Inomata to think that the builders of Aguada Fénix gradually were leaving their hunter-gatherer lifestyle behind, likely aided by the cultivation of corn—evidence of which also has been found at the site.

“The sheer size is astonishing,” says Jon Lohse, an archaeologist with Terracon Consultants Inc. who studies the early history of the area and was not involved in the report. He does not think, however, that the structure itself is evidence of a settled lifestyle. “Monumental constructions by pre-sedentary people are not uncommon globally.”

What it does unmistakably show, Lohse adds, is an advanced ability for people to collaborate, probably in the strongly egalitarian fashion that he believes was typical of early societies in the Maya region. Inomata agrees, and thinks the platform was built by a community without a strong social hierarchy.

As potential evidence, Inomata points to the even older ceremonial site of San Lorenzo, 240 miles to the west in a region that was settled at the time by the Olmec people. Built at least 400 years earlier than Aguada Fénix, San Lorenzo features an artificial terraced hill that may have had a similar function. But it also has colossal human statues that may indicate that some people held higher status in society than others.

It may seem likely that the people who built Aguada Fénix were inspired by San Lorenzo, but archaeologist Ann Cyphers of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, who has worked at San Lorenzo, considers the sites “quite distinct,” adding that the pottery found there is also very different from that found at Aguada Fénix.

A checkerboard of colored soil

So what might have been the purpose for undertaking such a massive communal building project? Study coauthor Verónica Vázquez López of the University of Calgary believes that it might have been a statement of intent: a formal collaboration designed to bring different groups of people together over the course of several generations.

Some features at Aguada Fénix could suggest this collaboration, such as a cache of precious jade axes that may have symbolized the end of the collaborative construction project. Archaeologists also have noted that some of the layers of soil used to build the platform were laid down in a checkerboard pattern of different soil colors, which may have symbolized the contribution of different groups.

“Even today, people who live in different quarters of some Mexican towns each clean their part of the central church plaza,” Vázquez López observes.

By 750 B.C., the monumental structure at Aguada Fénix was abandoned, and by the Classic Maya period more than 1,000 years later, people in the region were building higher pyramids that became accessible only to the elite atop much smaller platforms with less space for broader communities to gather.

“In the early period, people got very excited,” Inomata says. “Later on, they became a bit less enthusiastic.”