Across the millennia, one of our common traits is the desire to feel special: this has been played out in terms of aristocratic status, patriarchal markers, race, and middle-school politics. Finding a solid boundary between “human” and “non-human” is yet another instance of seeking specialness. However, both scientists and historians are making this boundary increasingly […]
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The Middle Ages were a lot bawdier than most people imagine. Although modern society finds a Christian-infused culture abrasively at odds with a robustly sexual one, such was not the case in Western Europe 500 years ago . . . Into this conversation, may I introduce the Welsh poetess Gwerful Mechain (c. 1460-1502) Centuries before
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Slippery reasoning that produces horrible results is unfortunately a regular occurrence in human history. While the 17th century witnessed the Scientific Revolution in Europe, sloppy logic (mixed with lack of information) led to some gruesome human experimentation. William Harvey had recently discovered (for Europeans) that blood circulates in our bodies, pumped by the heart, but
Arthur Coga and Sheep’s Blood Transfusions Read More »
The “Exeter Book,” – aka Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501 f. 112v – contains about 100 riddles in Old English. This example is number 45. If you are a Tolkein fan, you might remember Golem asking riddles at one point in _The Hobbit_: it was this genre that inspired Tolkein. The “Exeter Book” was recorded
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You are looking at one of over half a million pieces of ancient papyrus writing, found in perhaps the most famous trash-heap in history: Oxyrhynchus. Located in Egypt, Oxyrhynchus was a flourishing city between the 200s BCE to the 600s CE, with the sort of weather patterns that make archaeologists’ hearts flutter because they preserve
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The odd-shaped object you are looking at is none other than the Liver of Piacenza. This slightly three-dimensional object d’arte was fashioned by Etruscans living in the second century BCE. The main disk represents a sheep’s liver, with the three protrusions standing for the gall bladder and two other parts of a liver (called the
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Although the Ancient Roman aristocracy certainly showed off their social status with elaborate banquets, they did not actually purge themselves in rooms called “Vomitoria.” This misconception arose from some 19th- and 20th- century writers, who claimed that a Vomitorium was where Romans deliberately threw up their food so they could keep eating. In fact, the
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The exquisite sculpture in the first image you see is the “Lely Venus,” a second-century Roman copy of a Hellenistic original. The second photo is a phallus carved into stone, pointing the way to a brothel in the Ancient city of Pompeii. What makes the first a work of beauty, and the second a vulgarity?
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“The Priestess of Delphi,” by John Collier (1891). This haunting painting of one of the famous oracles from Ancient Greece – known as the Sibyls – is reflective of the lack of certainty modern scholars have about what specific prophecies the oracles pronounced. We know that the Romans truly believed that one of the Sibyls
Importance of Sibyls Oracles in the Ancient World Read More »
Hormones, as author Randi Hutter Epstein relays in_Aroused: the History of Hormones and How They Control Just about Everything_ really do a lot — from metabolizing food, to regulating sleep and mood swings, to the act of sex, to prompting our immune systems. Hormones can make our lives both really amazing and really terrible. So
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow and Radio-Immunosassay Read More »
One of my favorite moments in literature comes from the Ancient Roman poet Ovid’s _Metamorphosis_, which weaves together all the myths of the Olympian deities into one narrative. Among the hundreds of tales Ovid relates is the story of the contest between the Goddess Minerva and the young maiden Arachne, whose talents for weaving exquisite
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Although popular culture promotes an idea that the belief in magic flourished mainly in the Medieval European past, maybe declining with the onset of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th-century, this is not necessarily the case. As Owen Davies, author of _Grimoires: A History of Magic Books_, relays, the so-called “Modern” era of Western history
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This terracotta statue from Ancient Rome of a breastfeeding mother with four swaddled infants gets at the challenges of raising babies when resources were scarce and infant mortality high. Scholars have been debating the extent to which ordinary people practiced infanticide, but it was undertaken without criminal prosecution in the Ancient Roman world. After all,
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This watercolor by Julian Peters, called “I Have Come to Consume the World,” illustrates beautifully a central moment in the Hindu epic, _The Bhagavad Gita_. The _Gita_ is the most famous sacred scripture in Hinduism, dating to perhaps the second century BCE. This particular point comes in the eleventh chapter, when the hero Arjuna begs
Julian Peters “I Have Come to Consume the World” Read More »
Almost as soon as writing was invented, authors have developed ways of shielding their materials from unwanted viewings. Polybius the Greek (c. 208-125 BCE) [first image] describes how two of his compatriots, Cleoxenus and Democleitus, developed a method of cryptography that now goes by the name “Polybius Square.” [See second image.] By placing the Greek
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Tomorrow on September 29, 2019, Americans can celebrate coffee day. But the introduction of The Greatest Morning Beverage was not a forgone conclusion in many parts of the world. In England, coffee-houses entered the scene in the 1650s, and quickly became popular — London alone had 82 by 1663. The image you see here suggests
Women’s Pushback on Coffee in Early Modern England Read More »
The force of the wind and elements that this figure has to brace himself against well represent the reputation of the Ancient Greek orator Demosthenes. Greeks and Romans described him as someone who fought against the destiny he seemed to have inherited to become one of the most skillful speech-makers of all time. Born in
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The term “swan song” comes from an Ancient notion that swans are mute throughout their lives, but sing a beautiful last melody as they are about to die. As far back as the Roman Pliny the Elder (in 77 CE), people have known this is not the case, but regardless, a swan song refers to
People have claimed to see ghosts throughout recorded history. Stories about the “revanants,” or “those who return,” commonly state that these spirits startle the living, but they have not always been associated with evil forces. The association of ghosts with malevolence really got going in Ealy Modern Europe with the emergence of Protestant Christianity. Hitherto,
Lavater’s “Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght” Read More »
Scientific genome analysis has shaped history once again with a recent study published in the science journal _Nature Communications_. This painting of death strangling a victim of the plague gets at the horror caused by the infamous Black Death, a pandemic that wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century. By studying
Scientific Genome Analysis and the Black Death Read More »
