I know that mice will eat cheese, but according to many online sources, this is because they'll eat pretty much anything with nutritional value.

There appear to be plenty of other foods that mice prefer to cheese, so where, when, and why did the popular depiction (such as in cartoons and comics) of mice loving cheese originate?

Title ask the question.

Obviusly there was plenty of violence and disputes when 14 million people crossed the new border, but why did Kashmir turn into such an issue?

Why was India and Pakistan able to agree to a general border, except for in Kashmir?

I ask this question because there are no lions native to England or France. Why would they put an animal from a foreign land (Africa) to represent their country? It seems the vast majority of people, and even the kings, would never have even seen a lion.

Hi I have a research paper where we are supposed to utilize sources from different countries points of view. My choices are the US, USSR and my third country is either the UK , Afghanistan or China. Where can I find primary sources from these countries?

I found some US sources via the Wilson Center and NY Times articles but I struggling with other points of view.

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I'm curious to know if people in ancient Egypt or Zhou dynasty China or anybody in that time period exercised just for the sake of staying fit. Did they try to get fit, or was their daily routine enough to keep them in shape?

When reading posts about Bronze Age and Classical West Asia on this subreddit, this point is frequently made. Does this mean the Cyrus myth was an important part of Darius’s rise? Is the biblical version of Cyrus based on the historical Cyrus or the Achaemenid version?

Here is the excerpt I am talking about (from wikipedia)

Here Suebia ends. I do not know whether to class the tribes of the Peucini, Venedi, and Fenni with the Germans or with the Sarmatians. The Peucini, however, who are sometimes called Bastarnae, are like Germans in their language, manner of life, and mode of settlement and habitation. Squalor is universal among them and their nobles are indolent. Mixed marriages are giving them something of the repulsive appearance of the Sarmatians ... The Veneti have borrowed largely from Sarmatian ways; their plundering forays take them all over the wooded and mountainous country that rises between the Peucini and the Fenni. Nevertheless, they are to be classed as Germani, for they have settled houses, carry shields and are fond of travelling fast on foot; in all these respects they differ from the Sarmatians, who live in wagons or on horseback.

Now this seems to also have political background, so I do not believe wikipedia. But it seems that somewhere between 1st - 6th century the Sarmatians and Venedi gave way to Proto-Slavic peoples somewhere in the area between nowadays Estonia and Ukraine. I’d love to know about what is the current state of evidence of what happened then and there.

Did the Irish invent guerrilla warfare and the techniques used in terrorism across the world? We're any countries inspired by the Irish guerrilla warfare and did they study the Irish. Did any recent terrorist organisations study the methods of terrorism used in Ireland? How did this affect modern warfare?

There seems to be a strange pattern of how all modern languages belonging to the italic group spread and survive only where Gothic kingdoms were established and lasted on former Roman provinces in the early Middle Ages and but missing in all the other. I am referring to the Vizigothic, Ostrogothic, and Gepid Kingdoms. Is there any real connection between the two facts or the pattern is pure coincidence?

What would second and third sons look to inherit if anything, and if they weren't to inherit anything what would become of them?

Furthermore, are there any mythological tales with such spirits in them? I feel like I have an above average knowledge of Greek mythology, since I enjoyed it very thoroughly as a subject in school and whatnot, but I cannot think of anything relevant.

Hey there.

I know mercenaries had a variety of roles and varied in terms of quality but I wanted to know how they were preserved and/or deployed in combat.

Were mercenaries used as frontline ‘first to fight’ units, arguably like thrown in like cannon fodder while the units made up of ‘citizens’ were better preserved?

Or were they kept in reserves/back, perhaps being more experienced and veterans ergo used once the enemy forces have been worn down by the regular citizen soldiers?

I’m curious because admittedly in games like Rome 2 Total War, I tend to throw them in as frontline units to deal as much damage before being routed or decimated. Why? Well, mercenaries in the game cost more upkeep and it doesn’t make much sense to keep them around to level them up if they’ll be replaced by lower upkeep citizen/native units in the long term.

And I can’t help but think not many mercenaries would enjoy being thrown in into the hornet’s nest and come out with just a couple or two dozen men remaining. Mercenaries and companies probably would refuse to join you if the casualty rates were that insane, hehe.

Yes, Rome 2 and other games aren’t historically accurate. Casualties usually aren’t as catastrophically high in real life battles as in the games.

Still, I’m really keen to know if mercenaries were deployed almost ‘suicidally’ or more conservatively?

Thank you!

I might be completely incorrect, but IIRC a lot of the modern area wasn’t under Turkish rule until much later when they conquered and largely ethnicially cleansed the area to repopulate it with Turkish people. Hence, which people were the natives to this area, before the turks (and the ottoman empire)?

So this is more of a r/tooafraidtoask thing but I was hoping to get a more specific answer here.

The Eiffel Tower in Paris is basically the symbol of France. It's crazy famous and can be found on anything that has even a small connection to Paris or France.

But at the end of the day, isn't it "just a big tower made of metal"? Is there anything that I'm missing here? What makes this thing so special?

Does the Eiffel tower have any historic significance in regard to science, politics, architecture etc.? Or is it just so big that it became an important part of the skyline?

Hope this doesn't sound too stupid.

Full quote below from Empires and Barbarians pages 380-381. The point is by no means that it became an irrelevance, but stopped being a superpower and its success became very dependent on what was happening with the more powerful Islamic world it was adjoined to.

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"From the early seventh century, Constantinople was no longer a pan-Mediterranean power and major player on the broader European stage. Though still important in the eastern Mediterranean it became in many ways an unwilling satellite state of the Islamic world, no longer substantially in charge of its own fate. Its subsequent periods of prosperity and decline correlate closely and inversely with the history of the new Islamic power block. When Islam was politically united, Constantinople was condemned to decline; when - as sometimes happened - Islam itself fragmented, there was room for modest expansion. In short, the self-proclaimed imperial Romanness of the rulers of post-seventh-century Constantinople is a chimera. The losses suffered at the hands of Islam meant that these emperors were now ruling what was as much a successor state to the Roman Empire as any of the new powers of the Roman West a century earlier. My own preference, in fact, is to use the term 'Byzantine' rather than 'east Roman' from the mid-seventh-century, as a reflection of how great a sea change the rising tide of Islam had created in Mediterranean history'

Obviously by the early 20th century the majority of the population of Palestine were Arabic-speaking Muslims, but there was still a Jewish minority who had lived in the region for a long time alongside Muslims and Christians (with varying degrees of mutual amicability).

Is there any significant record of how the Jewish population of what would become Mandatory Palestine reacted to the news of the Balfour Declaration? Given that the declaration was made by the British government at the height of its colonial supremacy to a the Zionist Federation, an association of predominantly British Jews, did the Jews in Ottoman Palestine consider it to be simply an exchange of one imperial overlord for another, or did the Jewish minority welcome Britain's stated intentions of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine?

Had a friend suggest that this was actually true. I couldn't really find anything definite online so i'm turning to reddit for more info.