seduce me with ur history knowledge
vikings made their woman handle the finances because they thought math is witchcraft
The idea that unicorns are only able tamed and captured by virgins originated as a medieval joke. The idea was that it took a mythical creature to catch a mythical creature.
There was once an English minstrel called Roland the Farter. He was awarded lands by the king on the condition that he turn up to the court every Christmas to perform his characteristic “whistle, leap and a fart”. His children could keep the lands after his death if they learnt and performed the same trick.
There is graffiti from the Norse invaders that reads (roughly) “ I slept with Ingiborg, the most beautiful woman in the world ”
A close friend of Alexander the Great named Dioxippus, once told one of his generals, named Coragus, to stop being so up himself, Coragus took offence and challenged him to a duel in front of all of his troops unaware that Dioxippus was a champion of Pankration, Ancient Greek Wrestling. Coragus turned up with all of his weapons and armour, Dioxippus turned up naked with a club, lathered in Olive Oil. The match was over in about 5 mins and Coragus got his arse well and truly kicked.
When an army of Swedes went off to war with the Norwegians, they left all the women to manage everything, however, in the village of Smaland, right on the Southern Border, they were attacked by an opposing force of Danes. The women, led by a woman named Blenda, responded to this by inviting the invaders in, feeding them, making them comfy and basically having a massive party to get them REALLY drunk. When all the invaders all passed out, the women slaughtered them all with anything they could find, and when the men came back, the King was so impressed that he basically granted them a bunch of new rights that were previously unavailable to them. From that point on, all daughters had the right to inherit property, money and land equally with their brothers, and were allowed to wear military-style garments around town and at their weddings. They were also given the prestigious right to wear the Royal Coat of Arms on their clothing – a tradition that has lasted to this day.
The term in Chess “Checkmate” is thought to have come from the Persian term “Shah Mat” which means “The King is dead”.
Captain Benjamin Hornigold, the mentor to Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, once captured a ship just so he could steal all of the crew’s hats, because his crew had gotten drunk the night before and thrown all of theirs overboard.
Napoléon Bonaparte, the Corsican soldier who eventually became the Emperor of France following the French Revolution and Maximilien de Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror”, was terrified of cats.
King George III of Britain despised the Whig politician Charles James Fox for being a bad influence on his son George, for teaching him such talents as vomiting in the street.
Peter the Great, the Tsar who built St Petersburg, could bend pewter plates between his hands, would insist on pulling his courtiers’ bad teeth, and beat his own son to death, was terrified of cockroaches.
Queen Elizabeth I used to have a habit of turning up at people’s houses un-announced, requiring both accommodation and lavish entertainment, and often demanding gifts off the poor house owners.
Tag: history
Secret cinema found beneath Paris.
In September 2004, French police discovered a hidden chamber in the catacombs under Paris. It contained a full-sized movie screen, projection equipment, a bar, a pressure cooker for making couscous, a professionally installed electricity system, and at least three phone lines. Movies ranged from 1950s noir classics to recent thrillers.
When the police returned three days later, the phone and power lines had been cut and there was a note on the floor: “Do not try to find us.” (via)
SECRET, MILDLY THREATENING UNDERGROUND COUSCOUS CINEMA
I WANNA GO
LET ME JOIN YOUR KIND, UNDERGROUND MOVIE PEOPLE
nO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS ENTIRE CINEMA WAS HIDDEN BEHIND AN UNDER CONSTRUCTION SIGN THAT LEAD TO A CHECK-IN DISK WITH A FULL CCTV HOOKUP THAT WOULD TURN ON AND RECORD ANY UNREGISTERED VISITORS. AND IF SOMEONE SNUCK IN? A TAPE OF BARKING SECURITY DOGS WOULD BEGIN TO PLAY.
BEYOND THE CRAZY FRONT DESK AND THE MOVIE THEATER, THERE WAS A STOCKED BAR AND TABLES AND CHAIRS, MEANING THAT AFTER CATCHING A FLICK IN AN ILLEGAL PARISIAN CATACOMB THEATER, YOU COULD THEN EAT COUSCOUS AND SIP A COCKTAIL NEXT DOOR. THERE WAS A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICITY SYSTEM SET UP, AND AT LEAST 3 WORKING PHONE LINES. THIS SHIT WAS LIKE A BOND VILLAIN.
BETTER YET? IT WAS RUMORED THAT THE PLACE WAS SET UP BY THE UNDERGROUND FRENCH ART GANG UX “Urban eXperiment”, WHO NAVIGATES THROUGH THE PARISIAN UNDERGROUNDS AND ILLEGALLY RESTORES ABANDONED WORKS OF ART, ALONG WITH HOLDING FILM FESTIVALS IN THE BASEMENTS OF GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS. THEY EVEN RELEASED A SHORT FILM ABOUT THEIR WORK RESTORING THE ICONIC PANTHEON CLOCK OVER THE COURSE OF ONE YEAR. NO ONE SUSPECTED THEIR INVOLVEMENT, UNTIL THE CLOCK BEGAN TO WORK AGAIN AFTER 60 YEARS OF RUSTING.
IF YOU DON’T THINK CATACOMBS AND THE PEOPLE WHO HANG OUT IN THEM ARE SOME OF THE COOLEST FUCKING THINGS IN THE WORLD THEN I IMPLORE YOU TO EAT SOME COUSCOUS AND RECONSIDER.
What if one of the most important street photographers of the 20th century was a 1950s children’s nanny who kept herself to herself and never showed a single one of her photographs to anyone?
Decades later in 2007, a Chicago real estate agent and historical hobbyist, John Maloof purchased a box of never-seen, never-developed film negatives of an unknown ‘amateur’ photographer for $380 at his local auction house.
John began developing his new collection of photographs, some 100,000 negatives in total, that had been abandoned in a storage locker in Chicago before they ended up at the auction house. It became clear these were no ordinary street snaps of 1950s & 60s Chicago and New York and so John embarked on a journey to find out who was behind the photographs and soon discovered her name: Vivien Maier.
Dark Ages, Schmark Ages. The De-Textbook cuts through that and so much more fake-fact bullshit.
cloudy with a chance of witch burning
your periodic reminder that a good chunk of Europe basically shat the bed for a few centuries while everyone else kinda did their thing.
I am sorry I’m going to be that person.
This map is extremely inaccurate.
1) China was not going through business as usual China was going through the TANG DYNASTY i.e. the Golden Age of Chinese culture, which would lay down legal and social and poetic norms for the rest of Chinese history. The Tang is so influential that a lot of languages call Chinese people 唐人 (People from Tang.) (We call Chinese people “people from Qin” so.)
2) Japan is _first becoming literate_ during this time period (due to the influence of the Tang they adopt Chinese script), which is a BFD for poetry, religion, politics, society. Japanese court culture develops, which near the end of this period (11th century, around the time Europe enters “high middle ages”) will produce The Tale of Genji (by a totally awesome woman named Murasaki),widely regarded as the world’s first novel because of it’s deft use of irony and social commentary.
3) The southern part of Korea is experiencing the emergence of Unified Silla, a state that will last the entire period and will see the importation of Chinese and Indian buddhism, the construction of the first Confucian college in Korea, and so on.
4) In Mesoamerica, the Mayans are inventing astronomy, writing (the third and final independent invention of writing in human history), and a whole crapload of other stuff. This is the triumph of their culture.
5) The Umayyads in Spain are a massive center of technology, learning, and (comparative) religious toleration.
6) The Eastern Roman Empire, which spans both the green and yellow portions of your map, isn’t doing too badly either, bouncing back after losing territory to the Caliphate.
7) The Polynesians are colonizing the ENTIRE PACIFIC using amazing advanced navigation technology not rivaled until the INVENTION OF GPS.
8) I am not equipped to talk about Sub-Saharan Africa in detail (cue rant about how we never learn about subsaharan africa in the western educational system) but you can bet there are some major, amazing developments going on there too. I’d be shocked if there weren’t.
9) HOLY SHIT INDIA.
10) OMG SOUTH EAST ASIA. SOUTH. EAST. ASIA.
11) THEY WEREN’T BURNING WITCHES IN EUROPE DURING THE MIGRATION PERIOD (dark ages). Witch burning took off in the EARLY MODERN PERIOD, nearly 1000 years after this. Europe was going through some tough shit, which would leave them backwards compared to the rest of the world for 1000 years, but also there were some amazing things happening there, at least have the decency to be like “angry dudes with swords stabbing people” not WITCH BURNINGS FFS.
12) And ABSOLUTELY Islamic Caliphate was a totally amazing flowering of intellectual, artistic, and spiritual culture, a mixing pot between a thousand cultures and languages, and totally amazing. Don’t in any way want to diminish that in any way.
PLEASE ALWAYS BE THAT PERSON
Babylonian era problems. (photo via tbc34)
old school hate mail
Imagine how pissed you have to be to engrave a rock
Ok but there was this guy called Ea-nasir who was a total crook and would actually cheat people ought of good copper and sell them shit instead.
The amount of correspondences complaining to and about this guy are HILARIOUS.Are you telling me we know about a specific guy who lived 5000 years ago, by name, because he was a huge asshole
More like 4000 years ago but yes. Ea-nasir and his dodgy business deals.
And we haven’t even touched on the true hilarity of the situation yet. Consider two additional facts:
- He wasn’t just into copper trading. There are letters complaining about Ea-nasir’s business practices with respect to everything from kitchenwares to real estate speculation to second-hand clothing. The guy was everywhere.
- 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?
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Person: what major are you?
Me: history
Person: omg so what do you think about [insert obscure historical event]
Me:…
Me:…
Me: …that’s not really in my area of study…
Person: wow you must be really bad at history then!
I'd Much Rather Have a Dragon 