Seeing as it spanned thousands of years, multiple dynasties and so on, is it really fair to be say Ancient Egypt can be considered a single civilization? I realize there's obviously a lot more nuance to ancient Egypt, but the point still stands.

Just looking for something to pass time and hes always intrested me

Hi all,

I have a question about proper citation practice. Basically, I have the following scenario:

In one of my chapters, I have one paragraph that draws on and connects my work to the work of another historian. That historian's work is much broader than mine and quite different from what I do. Still, I think it is useful to me to show how my work connects to her's.

The paragraph is built as follows:

1. The first few sentences describe that scholar's work and are based 100% on that work.
2. Then I make the connection to my specific case. Here I still draw on her work but also bring in my own case. Thus, here we find a mix between her work and my interpretation.
3. The last sentence of the paragraph again is 100% based on her work.

So far I have only one footnote in this paragraph right at the end. This footnote extensively cites that scholar's work.

Now, I am concerned about the second part where I bring in my interpretation. I guess from the footnote people might think that the whole paragraph is based 100% on that scholar's work, despite the fact that some of it is also my application of her work/framework on my case study.

One could of course say that I could just take part 2 of the paragraph and clearly separate sentences based on my interpretation from the bits based on her work. But not only is this rather difficult and clumsy in practice, but it would also require me to basically provide the same footnote twice (first after part one of the paragraph and then at the end again).

So my question is whether it is fine to just leave things as they are with one footnote at the end, even though some of the interpretation in the paragraph is mine and not found in that scholar's work? In this case only someone who looks up that scholar's work would see what in the paragraph comes from me and what from the scholar's work.

I have seen historians use footnotes like this (just placing one footnote at the end of a paragraph) but wanted to check nevertheless.

Asking for recommendations on books from historians! Interested mainly in the United States during the mid to late 1800s, and on the German Empire and Prussia during the late 1800s

If you look at the Bayeux Tapestry through a different perspective you will immediately notice something important that the scenes that embroidered on it are incredibly dynamic and the events do change very fast (Harold Godwinson in Normandy, Harold Godwinson back in England, William's instantaneous reactions against the events etc.) so it just made me think that how could someone or a group of people who made the Tapestry manage to record the events that were going in two countries at the same time ? It seems like someone portraited the actual people with their actual reactions during the events but the logic tells me that it cannot be more than just an Oral Tradition based story portrayal. I know that Bayeux Tapestry is not the only source telling us about the Hastings 1066 but if it's used as a main source by main stream historians (which i highly doubt) how reliable is it actually if we filter it ? like... Was Harold Godwinson really hit by an arrow in his eye during the Battle as it's portraited in the Bayeux Tapestry or we say Yes just because it's seen there like that ?

Thanks for the information in advance.

I couldn’t find the answer anywhere but, I recall in ancient times (possibly Nordic or Roman) one army lit its fires for the night and pretended to be still there but in reality left within the cover of the night(outside the enemies walls I think too). I believe the invasion came at a high cost originally? Sorry if this is too vague or has happened before but I know it was a very large movement with hundreds of troops leaving in the night.

Curious to know how German immigrants and German-American citizens were treated by the Governemt shortly after Germany declared war on the US. Knowing about the Japanese Internment Camps, Im wondering if German people [and of German descent] got any similar treatment or what they went through through those years.

Note: This is simply out of curiosity and wanting to learn more. Thanks for understanding!

I reckon this question has been asked before, but I'm not able to find anything.

The Nazi's conducted experiments in the concentration camps on Jews and other prisoners. Was something actually learned from it, that is still used today, or in today's medicine?

Thank you!

I would like to dive deep into the subject of slavery. A lot of people discuss about the transatlantic slave trade, mainly in the history of the US.

But I would like to learn more about slavery that happend/happens across the globe. Arab slave trade, east asian slave trade and so on. Books that can give me a grander scale on this matter.

Thank you.

I hope the post follows subreddit rules.
Until recently I was actually convinced by the conspiracy outlined in the title, but I later realized that what is claimed is quite extraordinary, bizzarre and almost crazy, it basically destroys everything I know about early Greek history, and it sounds overall absurd. What follows are the arguments I myself presented in order to support the hypothesis. Is there any inaccuracy or nail in the coffin that puts to sleep this theory? My friends were kind of convinced by me, so they are using my own version of the arguments against me and I found little to no counter-arguments. Before beginning I have to say that the source of everything was Felice Vinci, an Italian engineer who wrote the book The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales.

Now "enjoy" "my" arguments

It was known since antiquity that Homer's geography doesn't match the Mediterranean, and this is often summarized with the saying 'Homer is a poet, not a geographer'. If we place the epic in the Baltic and Norwegian seas though everything lines up.

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Eratosthenes, famous for his incredibly accurate estimate about the Earth’s circumference in the 2nd century BC, takes a cynical view, regarding Homer as an entertainer, not an educator: "You will find the scene of the wanderings of Odysseus when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds." But maybe nobody was looking in the right place.

In the Moralia the 1st century Greek author Plutacrh wrote: 'Ogygia [Calypso's island], lies far out at sea, a run of five days off from Britain as you sail westward'. This claim is supported by the Roman historian Tacitus, who says that Ulysses reached the Germanic sea.

From here, through a deep analysis of the Iliad and the Odyssey, we can find many oddities, that appear so only if we think that the stories took place in Southern Europe and the Middle East:

· The Danaoi, which are substantially Homer’s Greeks, could just be the Danes.

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· The weather in the Odyssey is stormy, misty, cold and rainy. The excuse that is given is that the reason for this is Poseidon's anger with Odysseus, but if we think about it the weather is much more similar to the Northern European one, rather than the Mediterranean climate.

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· Homer's Greeks never eat figs or olives (as all Greeks of that epoch would have done), but their diet is made up of mostly pork and beef, food more fitting to inhabitants of Northern Europe.

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· The heroes have woolen cloaks and are overall very far from our idea of the nude Greek hero that fights in the sun. Everyone is heavily clothed, plus when Ulysses arrives in Ithaca a bed is prepared for him, a bed with layers (4 if I recall correctly) of sheep fur, which has no place in a Greek island, even in the winter.

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· Charybdis could the Norwegian maelstrom (Which Edgar Allan Poe himself describes as very Charybdis-like), and "Sicily" is a small three pointed island in the Norwegian sea. In the gulf of Messina nothing like Charybdis can be found.

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· The Peloponnese is, according to Homer, a flat island, while the actual region of Greece is quite mountainous and throughout all of its history, up to the 19th century, it was a peninsula due to the existence of the isthmus of Corinth. Furthermore Telemachus reaches the city of Pylos after one day of sailing (which is weird if we think that Ithaca and Pylos are more than 100 nautical miles apart), and Nestor, king of the city, advises Telemachus to reach Sparta by land, which doesn’t make sense considering the more than 1km high mountains between the two cities (any sane Greek would have used a boat). If the Danish island of Sjaelland (flat, closer to Lyo than Ithaca is to Pylos, and actually an island) is replaced to the Hellenic peninsula everything makes sense. In addition Sjaelland evokes the idea of Arcadia that was passed down the millennia better than the harsher Greek Arcadia.

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· Homer describes Ithaca as the westernmost island in its archipelago (while the Ionian Ithaca doesn’t fit this description). The only archipelago in the world that perfectly corresponds is situated in Denmark, plus the Crow's stone of the Odyssey is just a Norse dolmen, found on the island of Lyo. Further analyzing the Danish archipelago it’s clear that the areas of the three main islands are in perfect proportion with the number of men sent to Penelope after years of Odysseus not returning (20,24 and 52 men). The long island of the archipelago described by the Greek poet always baffled readers, none of the three major islands in the Ionian archipelago could be reasonably described as long, the Danish island of Langeland on the other hand has a name that actually means long island (and is part of the group of islands to which Lyo belongs).

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· Faroese folklore has legends of elderly women selling winds within bags to sailors, thus linking the islands with the Greek Aeolus, who gives the protagonist of the epic a goatskin full of wind

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· There is a very weird correspondence of names in the Baltic Sea, Troy is Toija (Finland), which has close to it we can find Tanttala(Tantalus was Zeus's son), plus close to the city we can find a hill with a name close to Sypilos, a mountain closely linked to Tantalus. Other suspicious names are the islands of Pharos and Lemnos, which would actually be Faro and Lemland in the Baltic sea (their location even makes more sense to the story, in fact, if located in the places that tradition attributes to them, they would cause major illogical detours)

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· Aegaeon, Greek god of the sea, sounds a lot like Aegir, Norse jotunn of the oceans.

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· Bertrand Russell, one of the main philosophers of the 20th century, writes in his History of Western philosophy that it is obvious that the Greeks are descendant of a northern people with light skin, light eyes and light hair (Ulysses, Achilles and many Others are described as blond). This is also clear by the fact that Mycenean architecture is completely different from the more Mediterranean one, as can be observed in Crete. It’s in fact rather close to Bronze age Northern European standards.

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· the Hyperion sun that famously constitutes a dilemma would simply be the midnight sun, in fact hyper is Greek for above, therefore with “Hyperion sun” Homer is talking about the odd path the sun makes when you get closer to the Arctic circle.

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· Circe is described as polypharmakos (of many potions), and she calls herself daughter of the Sun. The Sami people of northern Scandinavia also call themselves children of the Sun, and their shamans were typically females and used many potions of sort.

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· Homer gives an accurate description of Achilles’ shield. It bears the Moon, the Sun and the stars. The Nebra sky disk, a Bronze age shield found in Germany, is the only object ever found in archeological history that seems to accurately fit the verses.

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· Homer’s “boundless Hellespont” seems to be a really unfit definition of the rather narrow Dardanelles. The gulf of Finland is a much more plausible candidate.

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· The Phaiakes are a population that lives in Scheria, a land, described by Homer as of misty mountains (where in the Mediterranean are there these Tolkienesque peaks?) with a coast that raises from the waters straight as a shield that. It wasnever precisely located because of these weird features. It’s clear that the given description fits the Scandinavian fjords in a way better way than even the harshest Mediterranean coasts. In addition the Old Norse world “sker” means rock, and the author tells us that Scheria (which has a suspiciously close pronunciation to sker) presents little to no ports because of its rocky nature. Remaining in Scheria, Homer tells us that the river navigated by Odysseus to enter the land of the Phaiakes inverted its flow, quite a rare phenomenon in the Mediterranean sea, that could simply be a description of the tides that make so that the sea fills the fjords in the Atlantic Ocean.
The Phaiakes are portrayed as, almost obsessively, afraid of their city being covered by Poseidon with a mountain. In fact on the shores of southern Norway archeologists found what was called a “mini Pompei”, a human settlement that was completely covered by a dune of sand in a presumably short amount of time (maybe even one single storm), thus making the legendary population’s fears quite tangible.

I recently read SPQR: A History of Rome by Mary Beard. It got me interested in reading more about Rome. I also listened to the Hardcore History episode about The Gallic Wars, so I'm interested specifically in that topic.

Would a modern reader get anything out of reading Caesar's actual commentaries, or is it too difficult without a historian guiding you through the context to actually get something out of it?

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Hello wonderful people! Joins us today in this Panel AMA where a team of our very own flaired users will answer your questions on anything related to Iberian peninsula and the people and polities that inhabited it. Anything you ever wondered, ask away!

We will be covering period from the Roman times, through Middle ages with Islamic and Christian states, across the Early Modern Empires and the fate of Iberian Jewish population, all the way to modernity and Spanish Civil war, World Wars and Franco.

Our amazing flair team today consists of:

u/cerapus is a master's student in early medieval Christianity and popular belief, and is happy to answer questions especially on the late eighth and early ninth centuries in Spain and the Pyrenees. He is particularly interested in questions about Carolingian relations, early medieval architecture, Visigothic continuities, and is also happy to delve into seventh-century Visigothic Spain!

u/crrpit is a historian of interwar Britain and Europe, with a particular focus on anti-fascism and the Spanish Civil War. Their PhD explored transnational participation in this conflict, particularly the International Brigades that fought on the Republican side. They will be answering questions on the civil war, and 1930s Spain more broadly.

u/drylaw is a PhD student working on indigenous scholars of colonial central Mexico. For this AMA he can answer questions on the Aztec-Spanish wars, and Spanish colonisation in Mexico and early Spanish America more broadly. Research interests include race relations, indigenous cultures, and the introduction of Iberian law and political organisation overseas.

u/ekinda is happy to answer questions about Habsburg Spain in the context of early modern Europe. Some curious topics are the relations between its constituent states (excluding the Americas), reasons, means and the results of Spanish involvement in European politics and wars during the 16th and the 17th centuries (especially the 80YW and the 30YW), and the economic situation in Iberia with regards to the wider European economy.

u/FlavivsAetivs is a late Roman historian whose undergraduate research included political communication and post-Roman administration in late Roman Spain. He is happy to answer questions about late Roman and early migration era Spain, the Visigoths, and other topics pertaining to that era (c. 300-500).

u/hannahstohelit is a master's student in modern Jewish history who is eager to answer questions about medieval Iberian Jewry, the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition/Expulsion, and the Sefardic diaspora in Europe, the Americas, Northern Africa and the Ottoman Empire. She especially loves questions about religious history, such as: rabbinical figures; Biblical, Talmudic, halachic and liturgical works; religious schisms and changes; development of Jewish communities; and Hebrew printing.

u/Janvs is a historian of the Atlantic world, with a focus on empire, memory, culture, and social movements. He’s more than happy to answer what he can about the Iberian New World or the places where empires intersect.

u/mrhumphries75 focuses on Christian polities in the North, roughly between 1000 and 1230 with an emphasis on social structures and kinship in the early 1200s, Aragon in particular.

u/riskbreaker2987 is a historian and professor of early Islamic history and Arabic historiography. While his research primarily focuses on the central Islamic world, he is comfortable answering questions related to the Islamic conquest of Iberia and Umayyad rule in Cordoba.

u/ted5298 can answer questions about the World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, fascism in both Spain and Portugal, Spain's role in World War 2 including the service of 250th Infantry and the decolonisation of the countries' African possessions.

u/terminus-trantor will give his best to answer questions on Portugal in the late middle ages and early modern period with the accent on their naval and maritime aspects, as well as general questions about Iberian maritime, geographical and navigational science of the time.

u/thejukeboxhero will try to answer questions on early medieval Iberia: the Visigoths up through 711 and the northern kingdoms up through around 1000.

u/Yazman specialises in 8th to 11th century al-Andalus, with a particular focus on the 10th century and the Iberian Umayyads, but any topic relating to pre-12th century al-Andalus is open.

/u/611131 can field questions about Spanish conquest and colonization efforts in the Americas and the Atlantic World during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.

Reminder: our Panel Team is consisted of users scattered across the globe, in various timezones with different real world obligations. Please, be patient, and give them time to get to your question! Thank you!