I'm guessing the key is that Algeria is so close to France, only separated by the Mediterranean, and maybe there was a history of French-speakers settling along the African coast that I don't know about. And I wonder if Italy might have planned to do something similar with Ethiopia if they'd been successful there (though at that time it would have taken much longer to go to Ethiopia from Italy than to get to Algeria from France).
1 Answers 2016-10-12
1 Answers 2016-10-12
For example, if a overly-powerful Persian noble was taken down by the shah, might his trial include trumped-up claims that he was an Angra Mainyu worshipper?
Might secret faternity or mafia-type organizations have had initiation rites involving some sort of homage to Angra Mainyu so that all members of the group had a sense of being bound together by their forbidden deeds?
Simple cases of everyday blasphemous invocations of Angra Mainyu? ("I'll never tell anyone your secret! Ahriman take my soul if I do!")
I'm wondering whether there are any records (or perhaps spurious claims) of that sort of thing happening.
(N.B.: repost)
1 Answers 2016-10-12
i've come across references to the 17th century usage of 'cat call' as a whistle to show disapproval in a theatre. i'm curious how it came to be used to describe the act of yelling or demonstrating sexualized comments or sounds at women on the street. it seems like cat calling went from a signal of disapproval to one of apparent approval, though perhaps the intentions behind cat calling cannot be described so bluntly.
i'm especially interested in how catcalling might be related to to wolf whistles and the cartoon wolf stereotype.
1 Answers 2016-10-12
1 Answers 2016-10-12
Hello, I am writing a story that revolves around a young man who starts working on a railroad in the late 70s early 80s.
However, I can't really find much on the subject. Using Google I mostly stuff concerning the conception of the railroad in the 1800s.
My questions are: what was life like working on railroad? What kind of jobs were there? What were pay and benefits like, if there were any? Did people even still work on railroads? I know they became less popular as new technology became available.
To be specific, I want my story to take place somewhere on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad if that helps.
Any help would be appreciated!
EDIT: If you can't provide any specific help with these questions, are there any Internet resources or books you might suggest that could help me in this regard?
1 Answers 2016-10-12
How common is it to find a mistyped/miscarved/mistranscribed symbol in ancient pieces? Do we know what scribes and carvers may have done to reduce screw-ups when doing a big work like an obelisk?
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And if so, what happened? How did they bring it to a resolution?
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Both "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "The Canterbury Tales" were written in the late 14th century in Middle English. Chaucer wrote the Tales starting in about 1385. I'm having a harder time finding dates for "Sir Gawain" but it looks like the consensus is sometime between 1360 and 1390. Given that these two works were written well within the same lifetime (although by different authors) and ostensibly in the same language, I'm having trouble understanding why I, a fluent reader of modern English, can understand ~90% of the Tales but maybe 50% of Sir Gawain.
For instance, the first four lines of the Tales are spelled weird by modern standards, but the words are instantly recognizable:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour
Meanwhile, the first four lines of Sir Gawain contain a lot of words that either don't appear in modern English or have different meanings (sithen, sege, sesed, brittened, brondeg, etc.), in addition to pretty big spelled differences (askez->ashes).
SIÞEN þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye,
Þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondeȝ and askez,
Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroȝt
Watz tried for his tricherie, þe trewest on erþe
Did Chaucer and his contemporaries think of the Tales and Sir Gawain as being in the same language? Are they just in different dialects, or was English just changing so rapidly that all of this happened in the maybe thirty years between the two poems?
4 Answers 2016-10-12
My mother was with an SS Headquarters unit that surrendered to American forces in Austria in 1945. She said once that she was in the same POW camp as the future Pope Benedict XVI. Germany was paying her a pension until the day she died. She never spoke much about specifics and she has passed on now, but I have always wondered what unit she was with. As a POW, I'm sure that records exist somewhere. My question is where would be the best place to find the answer?
3 Answers 2016-10-12
Apologies if this is an obvious one. However, I'm a bit confused. As a Jewish man living in writing in Rome, why are his works in Greek? Did he then identify as hellenistic in some way?
Other jews writing during the time, such as Philo of Alexandria, did not.
2 Answers 2016-10-12
I've just watched all three season's of Peaky Blinders, and the unsung hero of the show is Arthur Shelby's fantastic hair. What would have been used to keep it in place? Someone once told me Victorians used egg whites like hair gel- is it a similar situation?
3 Answers 2016-10-12
1 Answers 2016-10-12
This weekly feature is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.
2 Answers 2016-10-12
From Cuba to Chile, it seems like most Latin American countries have been ruled at some point by a caudillo, like Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina. Why were those countries so vulnerable to being taken over by caudillos?
1 Answers 2016-10-12
There is a very curious mural from the Dahuting Tomb in Zhengzhou, Henan province, China, dated to the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 AD). It may in fact show a woman (court attendant?) holding a Roman glassware from the Mediterranean world.
According to An Jiaoyou ("When Glass Was Treasured in China," in Annette L. Juliano and Judith A. Lerner (eds), Silk Road Studies VII: Nomads, Traders, and Holy Men Along China's Silk Road, 2002), Roman glasswares have been found in China dating as far back as the early 1st century BC, during the Western Han period. The earliest known item was a Greco-Roman glass bowl discovered in a tomb of Guangzhou in Southern China, suggestive of coming via the maritime route through the South China Sea. We know from both the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, Pliny the Elder's work, and Ptolemy's Geography that Roman merchants were active in India, sailing there from the Red Sea ports of Egypt. From Ptolemy we also have remarkable knowledge about a Greek sailor named Alexandros who reached the Gulf of Thailand and Southeast Asia after crossing the Malay Peninsula (as contemporary merchants from India regularly did), with the site "Cattigara" most likely being the archaeological site of Oc Eo, Vietnam (where Antonine period Roman artefacts have been discovered). Moreover, Chinese histories (Weilue and Book of Later Han) assert that Roman embassies arrived multiple times via this southern maritime route, landing in Jiaozhi (in modern-day northern Vietnam). According to Warwick Ball (2016), Roman coins going back to the reign of Tiberius have also been found in Xi'an (site of the ancient capital city Chang'an).
Without further ado, here is the mural in question:
Here's the mural in question, from Dahuting Tomb in Henan, China, late 2nd or early 3rd century AD.
Here's a fuller version of the two ladies in the tomb mural: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dahuting_Tomb_mural_of_two_women_dressed_in_Hanfu,_displaying_domestic_wares,Eastern_Han_Dynasty(cropped).jpg
You can see the other murals from Dahuting Tomb here.
Look at the way it seems to shine with a transluscent quality. It could perhaps be a miniature, glossy "hu" funerary celadon ceramic jar (which possess a somewhat similar shape), yet she seems to be holding this object with the tip of her fingers. That would suggest a very lightweight object, no? Celadon wares were kind of heavy, certainly not something you could just precariously hold at the tip of your fingers. The object in the mural also lacks a few things that celadon bottles/jars would have had, such as looped handles on the sides that were imitative of Zhou-dynasty era bronzewares.
It could also be jade, or even silver, yet jade, like celadon ceramics, isn't exactly lightweight either. From what I can tell, jade drinking vessels from the Han period don't look like this at all; they usually have relief decorations, ribbed decorations, handles, lids, gilt bronze trappings, etc. I've also never seen a silver cup/pitcher/bottle/miniature vase like this one from the Han period.
The size of the object, the seeming lightweight property of it, the coloring and translucent quality, and the shape of it lead me to suspect it is a Roman glassware. The artist also seems to be making a point about it, featuring it prominently as a luxury item (other ladies in the same tomb can be seen holding lacquerware dishes and other items). What do you guys think? For an extensive amount of examples for comparison, follow the links here and you'll find a variety of glasswares that fit the description:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Ancient_Roman_glassware
1 Answers 2016-10-12
While reading Japanese history I noticed many people changed their names with great frequency. Tokugawa Ieyasu was originally Matsudaira Takechiyo for example; Matsudaira and Tokugawa being examples of clan names and Takechiyo and Ieyasu being ‘first’ names. Oda Nobunaga also had a different name at birth as far as I know.
So I guess my question is, rather broadly:
Why and when did Japanese people during the Sengoku Jidai (for example) change their names? Were there any ceremonial aspects to changing your name? Where did all of this come from?
And as a sort of second question:
I’ve heard about emperors having names given to them for the duration of their rule. An example being emperor Taisho is a post-mortem name given to him, his personal name was Yoshihito. Why was this done? Did/do any other offices have similar traditions?
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Is coffee a euphemism for some other sort of drink which is more readily available in Iceland at that time, or do they literally mean coffee?
Edit: Just realized that the book is set in the early 1900s. Question is still the same though!
1 Answers 2016-10-12
I have been reading Parade's End lately, and in the book, there is a movement in the British government to pull troops out of the trenches in France and ship them all to the Middle East. Was there anyone pushing such a plan? There are also quite a few French railway strikes. Was there labor unrest during the war?
1 Answers 2016-10-12
Why did they replace the Aquila standard in the late imperial period?
2 Answers 2016-10-12
As a specific example, J.R.R Tolkien delayed his enlistment until after finishing his university degree, and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant afterwards. Was there an official process where university graduates immediately got qualified for officer commissions? Was there any relationship between Universities and the Military to facilitate this? Was this a process other countries replicated? Is this practice still in use?
1 Answers 2016-10-12
