Saturday, May 30, 2020

Tumblr Thread: History Actually Becomes Fun


Sometimes history actually manages to entertain us! Who'd have seen it coming?

1.

Text - REI tilthat TIL of the "Tiffany Problem". Tiffany is a medieval name-short for Theophania-from the 12th century. Authors can't use it in historical or fantasy fiction, however, because the name looks too modern. This is an example of how reality is sometimes too unrealistic. via reddit.com incorrectdiscworldquotes "Authors can't use it in fantasy fiction, eh? We'll see about that.." -Terry Pratchett, probably

2.

Text - jeneelestrange Try to implement anything but a conservative's sixth grade education level of medieval or Victorian times and you will butt into this. all. the. time. There was a literaly fad in the 1890's for nipple rings for all genders(and NO, it was NOT under the mistaken belief that it would help breastfeeding- there's LOTS of doctors' writing at the time telling people to STOP and that they thought it would ruin the breast's ability to breastfeed well, etc). It was straight up becaus

3.

Text - brunhiddensmusings people just really, REALLY have entrenched ideas of what people in the past were like tell them the vikings were clean, had a complex democratic legal system, respected women, had freeform rap battles, and had child support payments? theyd call you a liar

4.

Text - tell them that chopsticks became popular in china during the bronze age because street food vendors were all the rage and they wanted to have disposable eating utensils? theyll say youre making that up tell them native americans had a trade network stretching from canada to peru and built sacred mounds bigger then the pyramids of giza? you are some SJW twisting facts

5.

Text - ancient egypt had circular saws, debt cards, and eye surgery? are you high? our misconception of medieval peasants being illiterate and living in poverty in one room mud huts being their own creation as part of a century long tax aversion scam? you stole that from the game of thrones reject bin iron age india had stone telescopes, air conditioning, and the number O along with all 'arabic' numbers including algebra and calculus? i understand some of those words.

6.

Text - romans had accurate maps detailing vacation travel times along with a star rating for hotels along the way, fast food restaurants, swiss army knives, black soldiers in brittany, traded with china, and that soldiers wrote thank-you notes when their parents sent them underwear in the mail? but they thought the earth was flat! ancient bronze age mesopotamia had pedantic complaints sent to merchants about crappy goods, comedic performances, and transgender/nobinary representation? what are yo

7.

Text - melusineloriginale Adding my personal favorite: people in medieval Europe took baths. wetwareproblem India had ways of processing iron for weatherproofing that we still can't match 1600 years later. dr-archeville Truth is stranger than fiction, and history is weirder than you think.

8.

Text - ayellowbirds this post gets better every time it comes across my dash. To provide some more: those Romans also had vending machines, automated puppet plays, doors that opened to the sound of horns when you lit a fire in front of them, and working steam engines. All invented by one dude, Hero of Alexandria. madamehearthwitch People generally want to think that the Dark Ages is the sum of the entire history of the world.

9.

Text - forumgamer Charlemagne had a frigging PET ELEPHANT, sent as a present by the Caliph over in Bahgdad. Emperor Frederick II. (around 1200) crossed the Alps with his own private zoo, including giraffes, in order to impress and dazzle his Germanic subjects, and it frigging worked. He also introduced legislation that a doctor was not allowed to also sell medicine (to prevent obvious charlatanery), but had to write a recipe for an apothecary to then redeem, which is a system STILL IN USE in Ger

10.

Text - combat on reasons of it being unfair and irrational. Oh, and he wrote a book on ornithology. Ancient Persians knew how to make frozen desserts even in summer, thus basically being the inventors of ice cream. Medieval monks had an efficient way of testing for pregnacy (by pouring the urine of a woman on a toad, which, if the woman was pregnant, would change colour...).

11.

Text - meganwest One of my favorite things to do is to send posts like this to my brother, a historian. He had MANY potential additions to this thread, but my favorite: My pet peeve is that everyone thinks that nobody traveled in the middle ages. I have a letter from a monk at Ripoll, near Barcelona, sent to a monk in Fleury (Central France) asking that they return a book they had lent. The book was first obtained in Pavia (Italy). The monk wanted it back really fast because he hadn't asked for

12.

Text - This was from around 1020. The more things change cheeseanonioncrisps The Ancient Egyptians had an efficient pregnancy test as well. They'd get a woman to wee on some barley and wheat seeds, and if they sprouted it would mean that she was pregnant. There was a study done on this in 1936 and apparently it had a 70% accuracy rate, which isn't a patch on modern pregnancy tests but is very impressive for a civillisation that hadn't invented the wheel.

13.

Text - Stone age people took surprisingly good care of each other. There have been skeletons found of people (homo sapiens and neanderthal) with physical disabilities that would have prevented them from providing for themselves who still lived fairly long lives and were buried nicely. Because it turns out even prehistoric humans thought that people had a right to life whether or not they were 'useful. They also had a primitive form of surgery that involved drilling holes in people's skulls, we t

14.

Text - coming back. Not to mention language. I don't know why this in particular is so hard for people to grasp, but if you're talking about homo sapiens then there is literally no reason to assume that their language wasn't as complex and fluent as ours. For that matter, a lot of what we in Europe think of as "the stone age' was happening at the same time as the Ancient Egyptians were building pyramids and having a whole civilisation and shit. You might as well present them as speaking only in

15.

Text - thefloatingstone There was a long held belief that most peasants were illiterate in the 1500s until literally schoolbooks from the 1500s were excavated in Russia of a 7 year old boy's learning to read and write. The the point where we actually have pieces of his writing where he GOT BORED and started drawing pictures about how big and brave he was and drew a picture of himself as a warrior AND wrote his friend (presumably also a 7 year old boy)'s name on it to show him "Hey look at this c

16.

Text - called Novgorod and is the most ancient recorded Slavic city in Russian history. The message to his friend was "Greetings from Onfim to Danilo" and just because he was unsure if the pictures he drew on his spelling homework made sense, he labeled the creature he was fighting with "I am a wild beast!" AHTR

17.

Text - Before these types of writing were discovered it was thought that the peasant class was illiterate and that writing was ONLY for the church and the ruling class. But after finding these as well as THOUSANDS of other letters, it became clear even the lowest peasant class in this time period were not only litirate but taught writing and spelling as serious subjects to the point where 7 year old peasant children could read and write.

18.

Text - thefloatingstone AND ANOTHER THING!! The "People believed that the Earth is flat in the past" myth only became a "fact" that people believed in the 1800s. Every scientist since the ancient Greeks knew the world was round and there are even Bible passages referring to the Earth as round. Quote from Historian Jeffrey Burton Russel:

19.

Text - "With Extraordinarily few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the 3rd century BC onward believed that the Earth was flat. The myth that people in the middle ages thought the Earth was flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of a campaign by Protestants against Catholic teachings. But it gained currency in the 19th century, thanks to inaccurate histories such as John William Draper's "History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science" (1

20.

Text - Atheists and agnostics championed the conflict thesis for their own purposes, but historical research gradually demonstrated that Draper and White had propagated more fantasy than fact in their efforts to prove that science and religion are locked in eternal conflict." end quote. Also here's a illustration from the 15th century from the book "On the Properties of Things" by Bartholomeus Anglicus, showing the Earth covered in buildings and spires

21.

Painting - lay etxla wusluaon 2u folat.

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