Leaders in the European Middle Ages issued coins as a kind of aspirational statement of stable power. After all, currency is only as successful as a community’s faith in its worth. But what happens when a leader goes out of favor, or dies? This is a photo of coins issued by two English kings, one […]
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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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This is Seshat, the Ancient Egyptian Goddess of wisdom and writing. It is also the name of an extremely ambitious historical database run by Peter Turchin, a professor of evolutionary biology and a mathematician at the University of Connecticut. He is trying to collect big data about human civilizations in order to predict human behavior
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This is a section of a 13th-century copy of an Ancient Roman map from about 400 CE. Called the _Tabula Peutingeriana_, it depicts the intricate system of roads and passages that made up the official courier service connecting the Empire. This infrastructure was known as the _Cursus Publicus_, and lasted for centuries as the primary
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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
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During the nearly half a millenia that the Ottoman Sultans governed their Empire, leaders’ talents of course varied, and predicting what sort of ruler the next Sultan might be could be guesswork. Two phenomena that developed at the top levels of state governance, however, tended to throw the odds in the negative direction. The first
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Shown here is a carved relief of the Ancient Roman goddess known as Bona Dea. Usually she holds a cornucopia in one hand and a bowl in the other from which snakes feed. These attributes demonstrate her role in fertility, for which she was worshipped throughout the Roman centuries — mainly by women of all
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Suicide has been met with approbation, criticism, horror, or distain, depending on the culture and circumstance of the act. In the Ancient Mediterranean world, elite people who were condemned to death by the state – or facing eminent death by political opponents – thought of suicide as a more honorable path. Pictured here is “Sofonisba
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Magic isn’t real, but people have believed it to be, and that makes quite a difference. For instance, at the seventeenth-century French court of Louis XIV, social anxiety among aristocrats jockying for power led to a tense and violent use of magic, fortune-telling, Black Masses, and secetive murders. Over 400 people were implicated in “L’affaire
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Meet Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin, a.k.a. “La Voisin.” Judging from her matronly countenance and placid expression, one might guess this late 17th-century French woman might have led a staid if uninteresting life . . . But nothing could be further from the truth. After her husband’s business collapsed, La Voisin turned to fortune-telling as a way
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There is an idea that personal hygiene declined along with the fall of Rome in Western Europe. Unlike the Romans, this line of thinking goes, the Middle Ages constituted “a thousand years without a bath” (as one popular textbook summarizes). In fact, Medieval washing is a well documented practice, and you can read all about
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Cosplay is not new: dressing up in character has a long legacy, and has been considered appropriate in different occasions. Whereas in current American culture, you go to special conferences or wait for Halloween, in seventeenth-century Europe you would try to hire a fancy portrait artist and make a subtle statement about your personality and
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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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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
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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
Here you can see the grim and chaotic scenes of battle depicted in the Ludovici Battle Sarcophagus, made in the Roman Empire mid-third century CE. The horrifying conditions that Ancient Roman soldiers experienced have led to a debate as to whether PTSD extended farther back in time than the late 19th-century. Some of the symptoms
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Pennhurst asylum and school – formally called the Eastern Pennsylvania Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic — ran for the better part of the 20th century as a home for people with mental and physical disabilities, but it was forcibly shut down after exposures of patient abuse and decades of litigation. Pennhurst’s cases of horrific
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So this lady looks unusually serene, especially in light of the fact that she’s using the blood of her own severed foot (!!!!) to write a letter to her husband. This is the heroine Hypermnestra, and in the Roman poet Ovid’s rendition of her tale, she pleads with her husband to come save her from
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Ghost stories have been an important part of China’s culture for centuries. As shown from this 14th-century Yuan Dynasty tomb, beliefs about ghosts can be seen in the visual arts, as well as in written sources. One of the most prominent types of undead spirits were the “Jiang Shi,” which were zombie-like reanimated beings. The
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