I heard a very small portion of an NPR program about 1800's mercantile agencies and found it very interesting, but I had to get out of the car and didn't catch much.

I heard a little bit about how they were the origin of the credit report in that people used them to ensure they weren't going into business with people who had issues repaying their debts.

You would walk into their office and they would look up whoever you were interested in and they would read out loud what they had discovered about the person. You weren't allowed to take or copy the page but you could take notes while they read it. You also weren't allowed to look yourself up. That's all I managed to catch.

I'm particularly interested in the people who did the investigating themselves, and what, if anything, people could do if false things were written about them. From a historical context these were still pretty recent, how far back in history do we have examples of this kind of thing?

Their societies were very similar in some respects and I was wondering whether there was any interaction between the two cultures.

I know that the Celts did sailing and trading with boats, similar to how the Vikings sailed far, across europe. I also know that the two cultures were similar in the way that they revolved around being strong warriors.

edit: Ahhh, so I'm seeing that phenomenon again. Where something gets upvoted but there aren't any responses. Shucks.

To my knowledge Assyrians are the descendants of the Akkadians and share linguistic, cultural, geographical and many more connections. Could historians elaborate further on this and more in depth?

Question regarding both ancient and modern day Assyrians. Modern day Assyrians being descendants of Ancient Assyrians and so on.

I was just wondering this... Why were walls such a big deal in Mesopotamia but not in Egypt?

WW1 has been treated as a chaotic and unwarranted waste of lives with the Allied commanders (or at least the English ones) being buffoons sending men to die in droves. WW2 comes off as treated far more respectfully. Be it the depictions of of assorted Allied commanders and heads of state, the Allied nations (at least) assumed to have took part in the war out of ideals rather than opportunism or trying to deal with unwanted competitors, and so on.

According to Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War, most of the people involved in fighting WW1 did so with enthusiasm. I also saw him on the BBC saying something along the lines that the war went on for so long because the participants enjoyed fighting it.

This argument seems like almost a Freudian approach to what starts and sustains conflict. Is this a controversial view? Most of what I see about WW1 relates to how terrible it was.

I've been reading about it quite a bit and get confused. Apparently many client-states rose and fell there. The Romans annexed Oshreone, and then it risen again, and then conquered again. Same goes with Mesopotamia. Meanwhile, there seems to be little dynamics... or maybe resistance from southern Syria, except for Zenobia and Mavia in 3rd century.

What was there before Syria became true "Roman", really? What cultures existed prior to Roman Syria? The information I gathered is really scattered, like it was very difficult to exactly know what was actually going on in the region. It feels very different when reading about, say, Britain or Gaul.

In the second part of Faust Proteus gives advice to Homunculus how to be born in this world :

In the ocean deep you must appear!  There, first, in miniature, one snatches, Enjoying the smallest things to swallow, Bigger and bigger, with what one catches, Forming the higher being to follow. ?

I've been reading Bernard Cornwell's fiction, and he talks of the use of forks in the early 1800s being confined to the gentry, or at least to 'respectable' folk.

I'm wondering - is this historically accurate? If so, what would people normally use to eat with? Just fingers? Or only a knife? What would you do with a piece of meat, or a bowl of stew? Spoons must surely have existed. . ?

To be specific, I guess I'm referring to Europe and particularly England.

I am aware of the Flynn effect, but this is of recent times. I am more interested in the last 4000 years or so.

To be specific, Was Islam and Christianity became the biggest religions on the planet by peace? Or wars? or was it something inbetween?

Also, what kind of reception was given to it from the tribe/settlement?

I've been watching a lot of WW1/2 documentaries, and it occurred to me that one of my grandfathers was German and at a ripe age for recruitment during the second world war. He passed away when I was young, so I never got the opportunity to speak to him about it. Evidently he made a point to never speak of what he had seen or done, so my parents don't really know anything about it either.

After asking some family members though, I did discover that he had been brought in for questioning in the wake of the war, as he had been suspected of being part of the German SS, but was found to be clear of any war crimes (thank god for that).

My question: is there is any publicly available documentation that exists for interviews, interrogations etc., or any way to find his history and involvement in the war?

Hi everyone. I would like to prepare a meal that would have been eaten in Aztec-era Mexico. For the sake of specificity, something that the nobility would have eaten. Though there are several recipes online, I cannot be sure of their veracity. Are there any reliable resources for authentic Aztec recipes? Thank you very much.

Also, is it possible that the Basque people and those who spoke the Tyresnian languages lived in europe before the Indo-Europeans?