I read an assertion that when Catholic monasteries maintained scriptoria for copying of texts, most of the monks did not bother to learn how to read. Supposedly they copied each page as if drawing a duplicate of an image, and that's why so many errors built up over time without being caught.

This was posted as an unsourced tangent ("Most scholars believe" etc) on an old forum post, and I want to doubt it, but I don't know enough about monks or scribes to tell whether it is plausible.

[deleted]

[deleted]

I got into a discussion with my dad today about the lack of permanent structures in Canada and the United States, such as pyramids or castle ruins. Is it related to the veneration of emperors and kings across the West and in Asia, or is it related to the nomadic nature of some Native American/First Nations tribes?

I tried to answer my dad's question to the best of my abilities, but I don't know much about Native Americans/First Nations. I figured it had something to do with the lack of a venerated ruler or leader in Native American tribes. We're both interested in knowing an answer! Thanks.

I'm preparing to write an essay on the similarities and differences between the two groups of religions, and while I can identify many of the sources focusing on Phoenicians, it is difficult to identify Roman perspectives due the sheer volume of books on Roman religion. If you have any sources that specifically mention Carthagian religion, it would be much appreciated!

If the Scopes and rifles were competent enough for Warfare in the 1940s, shouldn't the advancement of both not require a spotter in our day and age? I feel as though WWII would have benefited from the two man system more than our landscape.

[deleted]

I'm curious if the pilots that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan wrote anything years later about their mission and their personal reflections on what they did. What happened to them? Did they suffer any emotional issues from such a traumatic event?

Hi all,

A while back, I wrote an essay about fasting in Christianity for university. During my research, I came across the story of a woman who piqued my interest. Unfortunately, I lost the article which detailed her life, and I've been unable to remember or find her name again.

All I can remember about her is that she lived in Medieval times, that she (allegedly) stopped eating and drinking completely for several weeks or months to show her commitment to God. She would throw up any food she tried to consume, because (the story went) God had transformed her to live without eating, but to reject any type of nutrition. Some part of her body started to rot and emit a very sweet smell (she may have been ill beforehand, but I can't remember! augh). The bits of her flesh that sloughed off were considered to have curative powers (which I know was the case with a lot of martyrs at the time) and people traveled from far away to touch her wound and take away bits of her flesh and blood. I feel like this may have been in France, the low countries, or Italy. She eventually passed away after supposedly being in this condition for a few months.

I realise that this isn't much to go on, and that it can probably apply to dozens, if not hundreds of martyrs, but the bit about the sweet smelling wound stuck out to me and I've wanted to look her up again ever since. If someone recognises who this might be, it'd really help!

I found sources that describe the time as:
"for as long as necessary."

Was that minutes, hours, or did it change dependent on light conditions?

I heard stories of British Indian troops outright shooting captured INA troops on the spot, is there any truth to this? If so, why did British Indian troops treat INA troops worse than the British themselves?

Ok, now I'm a huge fan of the History of Rome, podcast, and a thing I noticed in the overview of roman history is this. First rome and the italian mainland produced a huge surplus of grain that the roman population boomed. Then they relied on sicily for grain such that Marc Antony could blockade it to try and starve rome. Then later on there are references to Sicily and Italy needing to import grain from Carthage such that when the empire was divided amongst Constantine's sons Carthage was a package deal with Italy cause they needed the grain so badly. Also we hear that Egypt was a key grain supplier as well.

What happened here? Why was it that italy had a food surplus then a massive deficit, and then sicily as well. Was the soil exhausted? Did the population grow to a point where they needed to import? Is there some other factor I'm not looking at? Help would be much appreciated.

The Germans (G43) and the Soviets (Tokarev) both had semi-automatic rifles later on, but they were never standardized issue. Why were the Americans the first and only nation to standard issue a semi-automatic rifle throughout the war? Was it simply manufacturing costs? Why did it take the Soviets/Germans so long to catch up with their own designs? Was there generally more faith in the tried-and-true bolt-action in Europe?

During the founding period alone (not Civil War era), was there any arguments at all from thinkers during that time positing that there just be two countries? It seems like many thinkers (Jefferson, Madison, and many more) saw the ruinous nature of slavery and it was fairly obvious that this would be a HUGE problem down the road. Even during their own period, there was significant compromises to keep the nation together.

However, it seems kinda odd that they have such a huge commitment to keeping the entire country together rather than just having a group of Northern states who abolished slavery and an unrelated group of Southern states who can go their own way. I understand they fought the Revolutionary War together, but it still seems very early on into a nation to have a national identity that one would sacrifice huge ethical principals to keep the country together.

Maybe I'm mistaken or the answer is obvious though... Were there other, more practical reasons? Was the Northern economy entirely contingent on the Southern states being around? Someone just enlighten me here.

edit: just to be clear, my main question is if any thinker of this time mentioned this AT ALL. Secondary is wondering why this didn't happen

With the recent peace between the government of Colombia and FARC, which included a blanket pardon for FARC members, I'm curious, what exactly happened to the provisional IRA members, of whom there were supposedly thousands, many of whom committed acts of violence, when the Good Friday Agreement (and subsequent documents) were signed? Were they still wanted by the police? Were they allowed to just lay down their arms and go back to life without punishment? What happened to this large group of heavily armed people?

Some years ago, I'd stumbled across a story that Thutmose II (maybe Thutmose III, it's been a while), who had gone to Giza and that the Sphinx had "spoken to him", begging Thutmose to excavate and restore it. Previous to this point, according to the tale I'd seen, the Sphinx, approximately 1,200 to 1,500 years old by this point, had been buried to its head in sand dunes and had been largely forgotten.

Recently it had come back to mind, and now, I can't help but wonder: was there any sort of organized archaeological...anything, really...back in the Classical Mediterranean World?

Obviously there was tomb-robbing and some might say that they were, in a very lose and extremely unscientific process, archaeologists of a sort, but that's not really what I mean. And while a modern understanding of what we might call archaeology didn't really exist, was there any sort of concerted belief by some contemporaries of this period that there was something to be learned by reconstructing the past through the recovering artifacts from those that came before as anything other than curiosities? The earliest records of anything of the sort I seem to be able to find, aside from the 'rediscovery' of the Sphinx by Thutmose would be various Byzantine religious archaeology, but that was in the 5th-8th centuries mostly if I recall and quite different.

And even if this was the case that it was considered such a taboo to "break" a myth by finding the mundane truth of the matter by recovering and examining artifacts or locations; to what extent was there a genuine antiquities market in, say, the Roman era, for Egyptian relics that even relative to them were absolutely ancient?

How widespread would the interest in it be: would they be confined, essentially to the provinces of Egypt and Libya and the Near East, or would there be some sort of desire of these sort of antiques throughout the Empire? Would they be actually displayed as antiquities, or would they simply be treated as a curiosity or novelty that someone might have?

Or, was there a sense of cultural superiority in a lot of ways by many of these ancient peoples such that the thinking was "They are not from our culture, and they are from millennia ago, so these things are junk and we don't have any interest in them at all", and thus there was essentially zero interest in this sort of material history until the birth of modern (that is, post-17th century) archaeology, first as an art and hobby and later as a genuine scientific and academic field?

Forgive me first post here.