Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.
Today’s trivia theme comes to us from /u/sarahfrancesca!
Okay, this topic is actually really interesting but it’s a bit esoteric so you’ll have to bear with me for the explanation!
What we’re looking for here is those little bits of daily life in history that no one would realize are missing from modern life. As an example, the person who submitted this said that she likes to think about how in the era before modern ballpoints and typing, people who wrote would have been walking around with ink on their hands quite a lot, whereas now our hands are very clean. What we’re basically looking for are the sorts of little asides that good historical fiction writers pop in to add verisimilitude to the story!
Next Week on Tuesday Trivia: going back to a nice simple theme: HAIR. All times, all places, all genders. Just what was doing with hair in history.
There’s about a quarter of a million eunuchs running around in America today^1, which is more than any other eunuch tradition ever had at one time. But eunuchs have ceased to exist as a category of being, so much that very few of these men identify as eunuchs, and even if they did, no one would know what they looked like. But pretty much everyone else in history totally knew what eunuchs looked like! So there’s a pretty poetic thought for you, more eunuchs than ever, but the “race” is dead and cannot be revived.
Lots of people knew what eunuchs looked like until maybe the start of the 19th century, when increasingly few people (outside of a few areas of the Middle East and China) knew what they looked like, then for sure by the start of the 20th century pretty much no one knew what they looked like. In times and places where they were common, so basically from ancient Assyria through the 18th century, everyone knew what they looked like. So as you walk down the street today, looking around, and casually mentally classify people into groups (that’s a woman, that’s a man, that’s a teenaged girl, that’s a tourist, that’s an African-American, that’s a Italian-American) just keep in mind, you’re missing the mental archetype was once used to identify a whole genre of people on sight.
The (usually pejorative) comments about eunuch’s appearance that were recorded are are also both a) cross-culturally very consistant and b) supported by our modern understanding of endocrinology. So, here’s what eunuchs looked like:
They were usually fat, with fat in womanly areas like hips and breasts instead of more male fat patterns like the beer-belly, and they had pale, bloodless and prematurely wrinkled faces, as well as hunched backs from osteoporosis. These markers happen for all eunuchs, both pre and post-pubescent castrated. (On the plus, they had thick, beautiful hair and never went bald.) We now with our science know that the hormonal profile of a eunuch is most similar to a postmenopausal woman, but the funny thing is the Romans knew that too without the science, because a very popular insult to eunuchs was to say they looked (and sounded) like old women. Consider Claudian’s epic 4th century rant against Eutropius, who was the first eunuch consul of the Western Roman Empire, wherein he puts words in Eutropius’ mouth calling him a “widow:”
Then Ptolemy, tired of Eutropius' long service to his lusts, gives him to Arinthaeus; — gives, for he is no longer worth keeping nor old enough to be bought. How the scorned minion wept at his departure, with what grief did he lament that divorce! "Was this thy fidelity, Ptolemy? [...] Leav'st thou Eutropius a widow, cruel wretch, forgetful of such wonderful nights of love?
And then calls him old and wrinkly:
And now his skin had grown loose with age; his face, more wrinkled than a raisin, had fallen in by reason of the lines in his cheeks. Less deep the furrows cloven in the cornfield by the plough, the folds wrought in the sails by the wind.
These insults worked well in 399 because everyone knew that’s what eunuchs looked like. For Favorinus of Arelate, 2nd century eunuch orator, comments about his sexlessness were also considered fair game. But by the 20th century this cultural knowledge was totally forgotten. In 1902 when Fred Gaisberg of the Gramophone company went to Rome to record the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, it’s clear in his journals he was fooled by his typical eunuchoid appearance into thinking he was an old man in his 60s, when Prof. Moreschi was only 44 at the time!
For behavior, they were stereotyped as sensitive and weepy, as well as being conniving and evil. Increased weepiness is one change that men who are castrated for prostate cancer do report experiencing, so there may be something to that one, but the conniving/evil stereotype is just because they were often in positions of power. Hormones do a lot but they don’t make you evil!
Height (unnaturally tall) was something that the 18th century commentary really liked to get on for the castrati, especially in caricature, but this is not commented on so much in ancient societies. Perhaps, due to lower nutritional quality as they were slaves, eunuchs in ancient societies didn’t reach remarkable height like the comparatively coddled castrati boys did, or perhaps because not all eunuchs were pre-pubescently castrated then, and it only happens in that case. Either way, tall and fat was the 18th century physical marker of choice for castrati, so much so that a 1791 treatise against opera and castrati has to begrudgingly admit that Marchesi (who was widely considered a handsome, charming devil) was not as ugly as other eunuchs, but still too tall to “pass:”
He is tall rather than short, but not excessively so, nor exactly unbecoming. His head is quite elongated and small in proportion to his chest, or the trunk on which it rests. The whole chest is proportioned well enough- that is, the thorax and belly are well-formed, and do not at all show that they are those of a mutilated man. The lower extremities, namely the haunches and legs, are quite long in proportions to the trunk; and their forms are well composed, pleasing, and not excessive. [...] Perhaps for that reason [all other castrati being so ugly], Marchesi is said to be handsome- not too deformed like all the others, in other words; or at least not too deformed. ^2
For eunuchs without a penis (which would be some ancient eunuchs, all Chinese eunuchs, and some eunuchs in Middle Eastern areas) they sometimes had trouble with continence, leading them to smell like urine, which, as you can imagine, was something ripe for unkind commentary.
The voice! We cannot of course forget the voice. Reactions to the voice vary based on how eunuchs were valued in society, the Romans characterized it as shrill and unpleasant, but the Byzantines and the fans of the castrati thought it was sweet and angelic. Either way, it’s a distinctive childlike treble voice for pre-pubescent eunuchs.
So now you have an idea how to spot a eunuch, maybe. Let’s go back to you walking down the street looking at people, and all your knowledge of what certain types of people look like, sound and smell like, take too all the pejorative and racist things people say about them, the color of their skin, their prominent physical features. Now just remember that every category you stuff people in is totally culturally conditioned and temporary, because an entire category of people can be totally forgotten outside of a few passing jokes in scarcely one hundred years. You, until you read this (unless maybe you’ve read one of my posts before?), probably had a very wrong idea or no idea what eunuchs looked like. You that you probably wouldn’t be able to spot one on the street tomorrow if Zheng He stuck out his foot and tripped you into Farinelli as a joke. But back in the day, everyone else could.
Blows my mind still, even after all this time.
Not that old, but: sleeper trains. I had to look into them for a paper I am working on. What a marvelous way to travel. It wasn't just that you slept on the train. It's that you could check in hours before departure, then the train would move in the middle of the night, and then you'd wait until morning to check out. Basically a moving hotel. How humane is that?
In my paper, a scientist is traveling from Princeton, NJ, to Washington, DC, by sleeper. If you did that trip today you'd either be on a train that you had to get on and off whenever it was leaving/arriving, and then check into a hotel, or you'd be in a car all day, or you'd be ferrying to an airport and then doing the hotel thing again. Instead, my scientist checked in at 9pm the night before, got to sleep, the train started moving at 2am or so, arrived by 5am or so, and he slept until 8:00am, at which point he got up, washed up, and went to his meeting. Then he did the same thing coming back. No hotel needed at all, no red-eyes, no spending-all-day traveling. Just going to bed and getting up again in the right city.
(Of course, sometime in that period he lost a top secret document on the train, which is why I'm writing a paper about him. But still.)
Oooh, my favorite note of detail from the ancient world: olive oil.
It's been noted on this community before how olive oil was an inextricable part of daily life in the ancient world. In his Natural History, Pliny devotes the better part of a chapter to the olive and olive oil, and talks about its cultivation, production, uses, and history. A few of its many uses (which, incidentally, still work in the modern day!) are as follows:
The Romans went through so much of the stuff that there is a hill in Rome, Monte Testaccio, located just near where the docks on the Tiber used to be that is composed entirely of the shards, or testae, of amphorae containing olive oil. Olive oil seeps into the terracotta of an amphora, and eventually the olive oil in the terracotta will go rancid. This meant that the largest of the amphorae which were used to transport the oil could not be reused. Therefore the shards were basically tossed in a heap behind the docks, eventually forming a very large hill of carefully-stacked olive oil amphora shards. If you've ever been to Rome, you know it's a pretty damn big hill.
All this just to say that when you're imagining someone from the ancient Mediterranean, and you've got all the other details right, you're probably missing one thing: they would all have smelled of olive oil.
The commonality of Biphastic, polyphastic or otherwise segmented sleep cycles.
The 8 hour sleep block is a product of the proliferation of electricity and the use of lightbulbs, which stimulate the brain similarly to sunlight, promoting wakefulness.
Until the introduction of the electric light bulb, most homosapiens slept over the course of two periods. These two sleep blocks were 3-4 hours each, broken up by one or two hours of being awake.
Furthermore, the siesta (naps taken during the middle of the day which shuts down a majority of commerce in certain areas) has been slowly eroding around the world as many countries are standardizing business hours to be more in-line with other countries.
Edit: I got the information from the first part from
Ekirch, A. Roger (2001). "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles". The American Historical Review (Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association)
He discovered a plethora of old diary entries, which talked about the waking hours of the night which occurred after one sleep and before a second. This is when intimacy and a lot of writing went down. Ekirch noticed, at some point, the mentions of an additional waking/sleep pattern disappeared in most entries. However they did not disappear across the board for all writers at the same time. The further rural the diaries were, the longer they mentioned multiple sleeps. This coincided with the rate at which electricity and the use of light bulbs proliferated.
Furthermore, Thomas Wehr did a psych experiment to test the biological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. He kept 8 participants in total darkness 14 hours a day for a month. By the end of the month they would sleep for about four hours, wake up for two to three hours, then go back to bed for another four hours.
When was the last time you used, or even saw, unglazed ceramic? By an large, the only real situation one might see it in, at least in the US and much of Europe, are in items very self consciously invoking rusticity and tradition, and are paradoxically associated with craftsmanship and high status. And yet until a couple centuries ago, unglazed ceramics, usually of local make, were absolutely ubiquitous and used for everything--in Rome and Greece, for example, sherds of pottery called ostraka were used for jotting down quick notes. Today, outside of roof tiles the rise of industrial manufacturing has more or less ended unglazed pottery as a practical material category in the industrially developed regions of the world.
Think about how cheaply a paperback book can be produced. A hardback book won't run you much more. Even if you're buying a limited edition academic book, the cost won't run you more than a couple hundred dollars. In the middle ages, books were really expensive until paper became popular in the fourteenth century. Many medieval people, especially in England, wrote on parchment. Michael Clanchy estimates that the average medieval person had equivalent of two cows worth of property on any given year. To produce one good copy of the New Testament, one of the most popular works in the middle ages, took about 150 calfskins. A good cow cost about 10 shillings (20 shillings = 1 pound), which means the approximate cost of a nice new testament is 75 pounds. For comparison, in the fourteenth century, you could build a nice stone house with a courtyard and garden for less than 100 pounds.
The number of books available at even small public libraries or community colleges, let's say 10,000 volumes, is truly staggering compared to the middle ages. Even if we lowballed the price of a medieval book to 5 pounds, that would be 50,000 pounds - in medieval England the king's annual income was only sometimes above 20,000 pounds.
We owe Gutenburg, paper makers, and publishers a truly great debt.
Sleeping prone. The reason why beds used to be shorter wasn't that people were shorter back then, but that they slept sitting propped up by use of bolsters and pillows. This allows the lungs to drain properly and prevents things like pneumonia. Hence why in hospitals they have most people sleep in a semi-upright position. A big problem when they don't have filters and air-cleaners, instead they had smoke from fires and dust to breath in all the time! George Washington's campaign bed he used for 8 years of the war was only 6' long, while he was 6'2" at death.
