Behold an example of a fabled Griffin claw, said to neutralize poisons and once collected as prized objects by Medieval kings. The upper image is of a purported Griffin claw, with a silver band inscribed with the Latin: “GRYPHI UNGUIS DIVO CUTHBERTO DUNELMENSI SACER” (“the claw of a Griffin sacred to the blessed Cuthbert of […]
Medieval Griffin Claw Read More »
What are these wee beasties adorning this 11th-century Old English manuscript? Not bulls-with-fringe legs, but spiders! I love that the artist makes their bodies more like mammalian monsters — but if you count their legs, you do see that at least the artist got the number correct. In Old English, many kinds of crawling things
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Here you see the Spider, one of the most important geoglyphs that form the Nazca Lines amid the arid coastal plain of southern Peru. The Nazca peoples constructed this and other shapes and lines between 500 BCE and 500 CE, in one of the world’s driest regions. Today the Nazca Lines are a UNESCO World
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Chariot-racing was one of the most popular sporting events in Ancient Rome. Throngs of people (up to 250,000 in Rome’s Circus Maximus) would crowd the stands, supporting their favorite teams (marked by the colors blue, green, red, and white) with fervorous shouting and cheers. The charioteers were much admired, and although some drivers could make
In the United States today is the Thanksgiving holiday, and a common symbol (besides a turkey cross-dressing as a Pilgrim) is the cornucopia, or “Horn of Plenty”. This sounds like a magical item from the modern gaming world, but it goes back to Ancient Greek and Roman times. Here, for instance, is a fourth-century
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Here are four different species of finches from the Galapagos Islands. Although they look similar, their differences include their beaks — each one takes advantage of a different type of seed. Natural selection shaped the trajectory of these birds’ appearance, and one of the scientists who first figured out how this worked passed away yesterday
Edward Osborne Wilson Read More »
TIL that 30 million years ago a species of mound-building termites evolved with next-level techniques that we humans could learn from in order to deal with our environmental challenges. These are the Macrotermes, and what makes them particularly special is the very ancient relationship they co-created with the fungus Termitomyces. Neither survives without the
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In their momentous book — _The Dawn of Everything_ (it’s got the entire field of history all a-tizzy right now) authors David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that the Enlightenment ideas of freedom, equality, and tolerance didn’t arise out of the minds of European political philosophers as much as from Native North American Indian intellectuals.
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To the northwest of the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia, in the southeast of modern Turkey, lie the ruins of one of the most important archaeological sites in human history: the stone monuments of Göbekli Tepe. Only discovered in the 1990s (earlier archaeologists has thought the remains medieval), Göbekli Tepe sprawls over twenty acres
This fleshy female figure, found facing frontal with felines (haha say that ten times fast) comes from one of the earliest human civilizations that developed agriculture, the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük. The ruins are wonders, spanning thousands of years from 7,500-6,400 BCE, built up layer upon layer of 18 levels. Çatalhöyük gives lots of evidence
In Medieval Europe, horses were highly valued animals, and great amounts of resources went into their care and training. Horses, like the one shown in this miniature painting (c. 1200-1210), would have mainly belonged to the aristocracy, who prized them not only for their labor, but their use in battle. Sources show that nobles
The way Ancient Romans treated their dogs mirrored the social relationships among Roman people, and this was at times horrific, and at times truly creepy. As Robin Fleming presents in her recent lecture “Dogsbodies and Dogs’ Bodies: A Social and Cultural History of Roman Britain’s Dogs and People,” Ancient Roman elites kept pet dogs,
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Ancient Romans were so used to human brutality and violence that they took its existence for granted. Whether the violence was directed by slave owners to their human property, on display at the regular games and gladiator matches, or observed at the very public slaughtering of animals for religious sacrificial purposes, it was normalized.
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Malaria is, like COVID, a largely preventable death: so long as the patient gets the right treatment at the right time. Many still do not have access to good medical care. For instance, in 2019, 409,000 people in Africa — mostly babies and toddlers — died of this disease. But malaria is not a
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Here are three close up images from one of the most famous Chinese ink paintings ever created, the _Nine Dragons_, by Chen Rong. Chen Rong produced this handscroll in 1244, and it is massive — over ten meters long! (32 feet) The aesthetic qualities are immediately grasped even if you don’t know a darn
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Today in my Early Medieval Europe history class, I had one of the funnest discussions ever that bridged from talking about Medieval ideas about sex (“only okay if done to make a baby”) to a 20th-century pregnancy test my students thought sounded perfectly Medieval. And this would be “the rabbit test,” and it involved
You’re looking at an 18th-century illustration from one Marie-Jeanne Valet, aka “the Amazon”, aka “the Maid of Gévandan”, showing her getting attacked by a monstrous creature. The 19- or 20- year old Marie got these creds for having successfully fought off the enormous and bloodthirsty animal, which was something that as many as 100 people
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This is a drawing of the prehistoric species Plesiosaurus, discovered by the paleontologist Mary Anning in 1823. Anning was a working-class, uneducated person who became one of England’s premier fossil scholars, but struggled her whole life — financially and professionally — because of her gender and class. Anning grew up on the southern coast
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This lovely creature was a Dinogorgon, one of many types of animals known as “Gorgonopsia,” the apex predators in the Permian Period. When I learned about how boss these creatures were, the nine-year-old paleontologist in me felt cheated because of all the front stage play that dinosaurs get. But these animals were amazing and thrived
Everyone knows that the Medieval aristocracy was famed for the way they promoted the military prowess of knights on horseback. Gargantuan sums of money were spent selecting, breeding, and caring for war horses that could show off the status of their aristocratic riders. There is, therefore, a certain amount of glee to be taken by
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