The Bygone

How has history influenced you? Do you regret going in the field? How hard was it to follow your particular path? - A Curious Consider-er.

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 12:44:21 -0500

History influences all of us, I think, because what happened in the past created the patterns that we’re all unconsciously following today. Our roots are in yesterday, whether we care to notice or not.

I absolutely do not regret getting into this field. Even if archaeology isn’t what I do with the rest of my life, studying it and loving it has shaped a lot of who I am today. I’ve learned skills I wouldn’t learn anywhere else—real-world skills, too, not just academic ones.

The hardest part of following this academic path was dealing with naysayers, with those lovely people who tell you that your field is useless, that you can’t make money, that you won’t go anywhere with your degree.

Don’t listen to those people. The study of history is the study of us, and there’s nothing more useful in life than understanding how people work.

Göbekli Tepe

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 12:42:47 -0500

Let’s talk about something old.

I mean really old.

Old as balls.

Let’s talk about the eminently sexy site of Göbekli Tepe, in Turkey.

Did I mention that it’s old?

Göbekli Tepe dates from about 9000 BCE. Archaeologists have dug up lots of stuff from 9000 BCE around the world. But there’s nothing quite like Göbekli Tepe.

The site’s been called the world’s oldest temple, and it’s easy to see why. There’s a lot of weird shit going on at this site. First, it’s massive. There are like twenty round structures and each of them is 20 - 30 meters in diameter. They’re decorated with this t-shaped pillars that are just enormous, and each of these is carved from a single hunk of rock.

And they’re decorated with some goddamn unusual stuff.

Perhaps weirdest of these decorations (I couldn’t find a good picture) are the reliefs depicting vultures and headless humans. The thing with ancient Near Eastern peoples is that they tended to remove the heads of their deceased. And then they plastered them. And put them on display.

For realsies. That guy’s from Jericho.

The excavators working today at Göbekli Tepe are convinced that this site had ritual or cultic purposes. But other archaeologists suggest that this super unusual site is residential, that it’s just evidence of our own lack of understanding of the prehistoric world.

Whatever the case, Göbekli Tepe is really fascinating. We may not know what it is there for, but it’s definitely important.

And really goddamn cool.

Hey, you know what everyone likes?

Mon, 07 May 2012 20:06:08 -0400

Everyone likes GOLD.

I’m sexy and I know it.

Every archaeologist wants to find gold. We may say we don’t care, but this is a lie. Gold is bad ass.

But life is not an Indiana Jones movie (WHICH IS AN AWFUL FACT, I KNOW) and finding gold doesn’t really happen in most excavations. Trained archaeologists may dig their entire career and find not a hint of the shiny pretty metal.

And then some dude with a metal detector may go for a stroll in England and find a goddamn HOARD.

This dude in particular. His name is Terry Herbert.

And thus begins the story of the Staffordshire Gold.

Terry Herbert was walking around Fred Johnson’s farm one day in 2009 when his metal detector started flipping its shit. Terry—probably expecting to find like a nail or something—started digging. And what he ended up finding is arguably the most spectacular buried treasure (real life buried treasure!) ever.

Thirty-five hundred pieces just sitting in the dirt. THIS IS WHY ARCHAEOLOGY IS AWESOME.

The treasure probably comes from the seventh or eighth centuries, at a time when the region was under the control of the Kingdom of Mercia.

So like, what’s up with this? The nature of the find seems to indicate that the treasure (eleven pounds of gold and three pounds of silver) was purposely buried. Weirder still, almost everything in the hoard is related to war, and there are no identifiably feminine pieces (which is typically way more common in Anglo-Saxon finds).

This is a gratuitous picture of more sexy, sexy gold.

There’s sort of a default answer to situations like this: in archaeology, when you can’t identify the purpose of something, it’s often classified as ritual. And that’s one of the possible hypotheses surrounding the Straffordshire Hoard—maybe this was a votive offering to the gods.

But some people call bullshit on this theory, since fourteen pounds of treasure is a helluva lot of metal to bury for the purpose of ritual. The more widely accepted theory is that someone buried all this treasure to keep it safe, but then was never able to return to dig it back up.

GET OFF OF MY BLOG, NICHOLAS CAGE.

And maybe it’s the very mystery of the gold that has grabbed the world’s attention.

Okay well that and the fact that it is valued at £3.285 million.

Remember this guy? Yeah, he’s rich now.

Anyway, the gold is in a museum now and continues to be surrounded by lots of questions. Probably they’ll never be answered, since evidence from this time is so scant. The Staffordshire Hoard will forever be one of the largest, and one of the most mysterious, discoveries ever made.

It’s just so sexy.

(PS: NatGeo featured this story back in November and it is totally worth your time to read).

HAPPY IDES OF MARCH!

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:39:58 -0400

Caesar got pincushioned to death on this day in 44BCE. It was dramatic.

If any soothsayers get all prophecy-y on you today, you might want to heed their words.

Hello and welcome back to The Bygone.

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 15:04:00 -0500

~~Endless apologies about being a terrible blogger, etc. Here is a gigantic post to make up for my absence.~~

LET’S TALK ABOUT CARTHAGE.

[THANKS FOR THE REQUEST, YUGIMUTTON!]

The ruins of Carthage are in what is now Tunisia. They are very sexy ruins.

There will come a day that I will use an adjective other than ‘sexy’ to describe old shit, but it is not this day.

Back in the day (like, 1st millennium BCE), Carthage was a Phoenician colony. The Phoenicians sure as hell knew what they were doing when they colonised the area—the site of Carthage would come to be super important in just about every single realm: trade, agriculture, and military. Carthage also managed to piss off the goddamn Romans. More on that in a minute.

According to legend, Carthage was founded by the exiled Phoenician princess Dido (aka Elissa) who manages to build up a kingdom in just seven years. Buuuuuut because this story comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, Dido then kills herself because Aeneas won’t stay in Carthage with her. SO TYPICAL.

Anyway fast forward to the third century BCE. Carthage is now independent, super wealthy, and an all-around ballin’ place to be. It is the most powerful economic and military power in the Western Mediterranean, and has the best navy.

It does, however, have some rather, uh, difficult neighbours.

Rome and Carthage had already signed some treaties to avoid conflict that they both must have thought was inevitable (Rome = conflict always being inevitable), and had even sided together to defeat Pyrrhus. But in 264BCE, their pretty little alliances all came crashing down.

See that island in between Carthage and Rome? That’s Sicily. And everyone wanted it.

The problem was that Carthage’s navy was like 29302X better than the Roman navy. And the Roman infantry was 29302X better than the Carthagian infantry. So the two regions found themselves in a stalemate.

So then the Romans started building warships…by copying Carthagian ones.

Frigging Romans.

[I KNOW THIS POST IS ABOUT CARTHAGE BUT I NEED TO YELL ABOUT THE EMINENTLY BADASS THING THE ROMANS INVENTED FOR THEIR TRIREMES: THEY MADE A GANGPLANK WITH A GIGANTIC METAL SPIKE AT ONE END THAT THEY WOULD SLAM INTO THE ENEMY SHIPS AND THEN THEY WOULD BOARD THE ENEMY’S SHIP WHILE IT WAS SINKING AND DESTROY THEM. SO BADASS.]

Ahem.

Because of the Gangplanks of Death and Badassery (aka the corvus), the Romans were able to turn naval warfare into infantry battle on the high seas. And thus the Romans won the First Punic War.

BUT BACK THE FUCK UP BECAUSE HERE COMES HANNIBAL.

Cooler than you. ~~I am so good at photoshop.~~

Hannibal was a Carthagian general and scholars generally agree that he is the King Badass of History. He gathered his forces, brought them to Spain, marched them north, and then right goddamn through the Alps..in the winter.

We are not in Tunisia any more.

Oh, and he brought elephants.

Hannibal’s ballsyness (ballsiness?) never ceases to shock me.

And it worked. He destroyed the Roman army at the Battle of Trebia River. And then he absolutely massacred the Romans at Cannae. It would be remembered as the worst Roman defeat in history.

After Cannae, the Romans realised that this Hannibal guy knew what he was doing. So they started chasing him around Italy, basically attacking him if they got a chance and then retreating. Hannibal, meanwhile, was low on supplies and didn’t have the equipment to attack Rome directly. So, despite winning both pitched battles, Hannibal heads back to Carthage.

He is followed by Scipio Africanus. At the Battle of Zama, the Romans defeat the Carthagians, and the Second Punic War ends.

BUT DON’T WORRY BECAUSE THERE IS A THIRD PUNIC WAR STILL.

This post is a novel so here is the TL;DR version: some dude in Rome (Cato the Elder) yells CARTHAGO DELENDA EST a lot (“CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED”), the Romans siege the city, the Romans build a goddamn bridge across the harbour, and then what follows might be one of the saddest events in all of history.

The Romans devastate Carthage.

The destruction of Carthage is so violent and so savage that the site is left abandoned for nearly two centuries. The entire population is killed or enslaved. Legend says the Romans even salted the earth so nothing would grow. What was once the most powerful city in the Mediterranean is gone.

I don’t have a joke about it because it’s actually really sad.

Carthage would eventually rise to power again as a Roman colony, but its age of independent glory was over. There would never be Carthaginians living in Carthage again: from that moment on, it became Roman.

After the fall of Carthage, the Roman Republic began to crumble. And thus a whole new period of history begins.

[Also, a GIGANTIC THANK YOU to everyone who signed the petition to get Spike TV to not air their disastrously bad idea called American Digger. I’m not sure what’s happening with it right now, but I know that a bunch of archaeological associations are sending in letters to try to get the show cancelled for legal reasons and also because it is AWFUL.]

I got curious about Nicaeaeaeaeae and Googled it - isn't it now called Iznik in Turkey?

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 22:44:00 -0500

Nicaeaeaeaeae is the ancient city. It’s inside the modern city of Iznik in northwestern Turkey. It’s super fertile, which is probably why there’s been settlement there for basically forever.

Also it has sexy ruins.

[Update]

Anonymous asked thebygone:
Was referring to “A city was founded here following the the battle, called Nicaea, which hasn’t been discovered.” from the Alexander the Great movie post - sorry, didn’t realize how old it was, should have clarified.

GOLLY THAT WAS AGES AGO ANON.

Yeah so confusingly, there are multiple Nicaea’s. Just like there are multiple Alexandria’s because apparently Alexander the Great just got super tired of having to come up with all these new city names because his life was so haaard and he founded so maaaany. So there is the Nicaea in Iznik, and there was also this mysterious, never-discovered one in the Punjab.

THANKS FOR MAKING IT EASY FOR US, ALEX.

ameliaelizabeth: Petition: Stop Spike TV from looting our collective past I’m serious guys,...

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:35:00 -0500

ameliaelizabeth:

Petition: Stop Spike TV from looting our collective past

I’m serious guys, this is really fucking important.

Archaeological sites can only be dug up once. They want to go in with metal detectors, locate ‘treasure’, bulldoze it, and sell it. If there’s an artefact there, it’s a fucking site. It needs to be dug up properly. Everything needs to be documented. Even the colour of the fucking dirt needs to be recorded. Otherwise we lose all kinds of really valuable information and in doing so, we lose a bit of our human past. Our last tiny thread of connection with the people of the past is going to be bulldozed so Spike TV can make money.

Please please please please please go sign that petition. God knows if it will actually make a difference, but at least we’ll be making some noise. The past belongs to everyone: it’s not there so a select few get some dollars in their bank account.

I know this blog hasn’t been updated in forever and I apologise.

I will come back and write tongue-in-cheek retellings of ancient history soon.

But right now, there are still a fair number of you following, and we need numbers. Spike TV is starting a series that follows a former wrestler and a salvage crew as they decimate sites for artefacts they can sell for profit.

It’s horrible. They are going to do a hell of a lot of damage.

Please please sign this petition, you guys. The archaeological world and the world in general really needs this show to not happen.

There is an excellent article over at National Geographic right...

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:32:00 -0400

There is an excellent article over at National Geographic right now about everyone’s favourite Ice Man.

Long story short: he’s not so icy anymore.

Back in 2010, the famous Neolithic man—who was naturally mummified after ~~being killed~~ dying on top of a mountain in Italy—was purposefully thawed so that an autopsy could be performed on him.

And the finds, dear readers, were pretty freaking spectacular. Click for the article!

This is a long post because she is my spirit animal.

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:38:00 -0400

I can’t believe that Hollywood hasn’t made a pseudo-historical movie—in which all the actors speak with British accents and wear aesthetically pleasing costumes—about Eleanor of Aquitaine since The Lion in Winter.

Because Eleanor, my friends, is freaking fabulous.

Eleanor was born in 1122AD, known now as the High Middle Ages. It was the time of Robin Hood (a story that Eleanor, as mother of King John, is intricately connected to), the Crusades, mad impressive architecture, and French people.

And out of the land of said French people came William X, Duke of Aquitaine.

In the eventual movie of Eleanor’s life, I think her father William (Guillaume?) will play a significant role. William was a patron of arts and literature and music. This is pretty fab, since practically no one apart from monks read much back then.

“I cannot wait for someone to invent fanfiction.”

Eleanor was his oldest child. Born Aliénor d’Aquitaine, she must have shown a spark of intelligence young. William ensured her thorough education: she was taught not only in both forms of Old French (les langues d’oïl et les langues d’oc), Latin, the arts, and presumably politics, but also in horseback riding, hunting, and hawking.

Like a boss.

Eleanor’s mom and brother died when she was six, putting her in line to inherit Aquitaine, the biggest and most pimpin’ of France’s provinces.

When Eleanor was fifteen, her father set out on a pilgrimage from which he would never return. At fifteen freaking years old, Eleanor became one of the richest and most marriageable people in Europe.

Also the most kidnappable, because stealing an heiress meant stealing a title, back in the good old days. Her father, to protect his daughter, had arranged that upon his death, Eleanor would come under the protection of Louis VI of France—the goddamn king.

Unfortunately, Louis was far more concerned about securing the rich as balls duchy of Aquitaine for himself than he was about the grieving Eleanor. Instead of, you know, protecting her, he married her to his son and took her lands.

That was a jerk move and I’m therefore glad that history remembers you as ‘Louis the Fat’.

William died in April. Eleanor was married to Prince Louis by July. By August 1st, the king had died and Eleanor was now the Queen of France. She gave birth to a daughter some years later.

Eleanor was twenty-three when the Second Crusade began. Not one to sit idly by while the men went on jolly crusade, Eleanor got Aquitainian soldiers and her ladies, and journeyed with her husband to the Holy Land.

The Second Crusade is one of history’s most brutal disasters.

“Merde.”

It must have been a defining moment in Eleanor’s life. She would have seen so many things she had never seen before, from life in Byzantium to fields of dead soldiers. Her husband’s failures as a military leader clearly tortured Eleanor: she was imprisoned twice by him for refusing to follow his orders.

They returned home on separate ships. During storms that divided them (wow, the metaphors apparent in that sentence), both ships went missing for two months. When eventually the king and queen found one another again, the filed for annulment with the pope.

The pope, instead, made them sleep with each other.

“You have GOT to be kidding me.”

They thus conceived their second daughter.

With no sons and that whole imprisonment thing between them, the King and Queen annulled their marriage in 1152. Eleanor was thirty. She got her lands back; Louis got her daughters.

Eight weeks later, Eleanor was married to Henry II, Duke of Normandy.

And thus begins the history of one of the most storied families ever. Welcome, dear readers, to the House of Plantagenet.

Kate Beaton did it best.

Two years later, Henry was King of England.

Henry and Eleanor fought and had affairs and incited rumours and fought some more, but over thirteen years they managed eight children. Three of her sons— Henry the Young, Richard the Lionheart, and King John—would be kings.

Eventually, though, the incessant fighting and adultery stopped being sexy and started being annoying, so when Eleanor was forty-five, she peaced to Poitiers.

According to the stories, it is here that Eleanor and her daughter Marie (from her marriage to Louis) encouraged the growth of arts, literature, music, troubadours, courtly love in a court of their own making. Compared to her early days, this would have been a quiet life for Eleanor, free of political intrigue and war.

So of course, it didn’t last.

Eleanor was fifty-one when her sons rebelled against their father. (When you’re the kid of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, you’re allowed to have a rebellious streak). For her encouragement of their revolt, Eleanor was imprisoned by Henry. She would remain imprisoned for sixteen years.

When the revolution failed and Henry the Young died, Eleanor was finally granted some freedom (though she would remain under control of a custodian). Henry died when Eleanor was sixty-six.

With his father’s death, Richard the Lionheart—Eleanor’s favourite son—ascended the throne. Among his first acts was so eradicate any remaining traces of surveillance from his mother’s life. While Richard was in France, Eleanor ruled England in his name.

“Don’t worry, guys—my mom’s got this.”

Eleanor would live to see Richard’s death and the ascension of King John to the throne. In 1201, exhausted by never-ending disputes and wars, Eleanor declared herself a nun and retreated from the public sphere. She died three years later at the age of eighty-two.

Eleanor is a woman who took control of her life and incited some serious change. She directed the course of history and created a powerhouse family (that, granted, liked to stab each other). She was contrary and moody and influential and powerful and—as we see by her reactions during the Crusade and her later retreat from public life—very, very human. This is one amazing woman.

TL;DR: Eleanor of Aquitaine was a bad ass.

So if any screenwriters want to get on making this movie, that’d be much appreciated.

A note about wearing gloves when handling ancient books.

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:03:00 -0400

This is a controversial topic, and since there are over a dozen comments concerning it on that last post we made, here’s a note about it.

Gloves are not considered mandatory in all places when handling ancient material. There is an awesome article about it here (see page four), but these are the main concerns:

they lower the wearer’s dexterity
they can be as contaminated as bare skin
wearing gloves warms the hands and ups the skin’s sweat production

The article linked to above recommends washing hands before handling old books.

But. There are exceptions to every rule, and there will always be those who say that gloves should be mandatory in archives. What do you guys think?

Finding Archimedes in the Shadows Now here’s a cool...

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:10:00 -0400

Finding Archimedes in the Shadows

Now here’s a cool story.

This is a 10th-century prayer book. It is beautiful and precious, as all old books are, and its long and torrid history involved freedom fighters and anonymous millionaire benefactors and Nazis and ancient monasteries.

But this prayer book has a secret.

The pages it is written on are recycled pages…from Archimedes’ third-century BCE writings.

Using special lighting and optics, a team has spent twelve years studying every page of this book, searching for the ancient writings beneath the obvious words. There is a whole other story under the words of this codex. I’m so glad that somebody found them.

[Re: The lack of gloves in the first picture]

GPOYFTT: Gratuitous Picture of Your Favourite Tholos Tomb This...

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 11:30:00 -0400

GPOYFTT: Gratuitous Picture of Your Favourite Tholos Tomb

This is the so-called Treasury of Atreus / Tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae in Greece. It is probably not a treasury and it probably didn’t belong to Agamemnon, though. It was, however, almost definitely a tomb, because this style shows up all throughout Mycenaean Greece (although this one was clearly super important because of its sheer gigantitude).

The lintel stone over the doorway is the biggest in the world, weighing 120 tonnes (!!!).

It is a sexy building.

(First photo from here, second photo from here, and third photo by yours truly).

The year is anywhere from 4000BCE to 1500CE and you live in what is now Alberta.

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:27:39 -0400

The real reason I changed the site name was so I could talk about Canada.

Well, you don’t really live in Alberta, because a) Alberta doesn’t exist and b) you’re partially or completely nomadic. Your tribe (any one of the over thirty that have traveled through this region) follows buffalo over the plains of North America.

And how do you hunt enough buffalo to feed your clan?

In the most bad ass way possible, that’s how.

Enter: The Buffalo Jump.

In southern Alberta there’s a site known as Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.

So, like, that pretty much sums it up.

You fall, and your head gets smashed in.

When archaeologists excavated the base of these cliffs, they found smashed up buffalo bones going down for twelve goddamn meters. It was, they estimated, the result of hunting practices going back at least six thousand years.

Here’s how it worked: hunters, dressed as buffalo predators, would corral the herd together, inciting a stampede that could stretch for kilometers. This was pretty frigging dangerous. Buffalo weigh something like 2000 pounds: not something you really want to have freaking the fuck out right beside you.

NO THANKS.

The hunters would chase the herd to the cliffs, where they would be driven over the ten meter drop (that’s thirty-two feet).

It was basically like this, only they weren’t going over the cliff by choice.

The amount of game captured in these jumps would have been freaking enormous. To process all the resulting finds, encampments would be set up nearby. The clans would process every part of the buffalo. Presumably there’d be a boatload of surplus, considering how many bones were left in situ at the base of the jump.

These sites were important for more than just sustenance. The gathering of so much meat meant that more time could be focused on cultural developments like art. When you don’t have to worry about starving to death, you get to explore all other aspects of being human. This is true of every single culture in the world.

Post European contact, Head-Smashed-In stopped being used as a hunting ground. Today, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, complete with a museum.

BIG CHANGES AHOY

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:21:00 -0400

But don’t worry! This is still the Fuck Yeah Ancient History that you know and love!

~~Mostly.~~

We’ve renamed the site to The Bygone, because it’s a lot easier to market a site when the word ‘fuck’ is not involved. Also, this lets us post about all of history, not just the ancient stuff! Which is particularly awesome, because there is so much cool stuff we can now talk about.

Stay tuned for posts about the so-called ‘New World’, and the Crusades, and the general craziness of the Early Modern Period, and basically everything that’s ever happened in the world.

Much love,
-Your frazzled admin.

[As always, feel free to send us messages!]

In which we talk about physics and Judea.

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:19:00 -0400

DID YOU GUYS KNOW that it is theoretically possible to get a picture of the past? Like, a snapshot of bygone eras? It’s pretty elaborate (it involves really frigging big mirrors…in space) but I have been assured that it makes absolute sense from a physics point of view.

So how delicious is that?!

So the question arises: who would you like to see a picture of? Cleopatra? Genghis Khan? ~~Hercules?~~

How about Bar Kochba?

Because let me tell you, for all his BAMFiness, we know distressingly little about the dude who led a Jewish revolt against the Romans, keeping them out of Judea for three goddamn years.

We know he minted coins!

Okay so in 68CE, the Jewish population in Palestine was like YEAH NO THANKS ROME and revolted. The Jews took Jerusalem, resulting in siege by Roman forces. Rome, led by Vespasian’s son Titus, eventually won, and razed the city. They brought booty back to Rome and Titus built himself a pretty little arch.

Jewish booty, as represented on the pretty little arch.

Just because the revolution had been ended, though, didn’t mean that Jewish dissent against Rome did. In 132CE it flared up again. It could be because the Roman emperor Hadrian banned circumcision. It could be because Hadrian was going to build a pagan temple on the ruins of a Jewish temple. It could be because Hadrian renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina.

And so it began. Bar Kochba: enter stage right.

Bar Kochba was actually (probably—there are like a million papers about this on JSTOR) named Simon ben Kosiba, which means something like Simon, son of Kosiba. However, because of his supreme BAMFiness, a rabbi renamed him Bar Kochba, which means Son of a Star in Aramaic. This is because of the prophecy of Numbers 24:17, which claimed that the Messiah would come as a “star out of Jacob.”

So, like, no pressure, Simon.

Simon rose to the challenge, and ended up establishing the independent Jewish state of Israel, which he then ruled over for three years.

So that’s a big deal.

The revolt, with Simon in the lead, spread like wildfire through Palestine. It spread so fast, in fact, that it freaked the Romans right out.

“WAIT WHAT?”

Hadrian called his favourite general Severus and was all “YO GET BACK FROM BRITAIN AND GO TO PALESTINE IT’S ONLY A SHORT WALK” and Severus did so with twelve goddamn legions.

One Roman legion contained up to 3000 men. There were twenty-four legions in Rome. Hadrian sent half of Rome’s entire fighting force to Judea.

This fact, ladies and gentlemen, continues to blow my mind.

And what makes these figures even more shocking is that the Romans lost nearly two full legions of fighters. These are the Romans we’re talking about—they were not used to suffering heavy losses.

By the time Rome managed to stop the revolt and reclaim Jerusalem, 580 000 civilian Jews had been killed, 50 fortified towns were gone, and 985 villages had been razed (side note: these figures come from the Roman writer Cassius Dio, who was understandably biased).

This war was clearly devastating, and Hadrian was not forgiving: Jews were banned from Jerusalem, banned from burying their dead in Betar, banned from practicing Torah law, banned from talking of Judea or Israel, and then Rome executed Jewish military leaders and scholars.

But we still don’t know much about Bar Kochba. The Romans don’t even mention him, and what we have from the Jewish side is limited to letters discovered in a cave in Judea earlier this century (the Dead Sea Scrolls were found a few caves over). The letters, some of them from Bar Kochba himself, show his increasing desperation near the end of the war.

And, realistically, these letters are probably the closest thing we’ll ever get to having a snapshot of this mysterious man.

His name, by the way? It was changed to Simon bar Kozeba at the end of the war. It means Simon, Son of Deception.

History, my friends, is fickle.

FYAH and Affiliates accept no responsibility for damages the following may incur.

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 13:39:00 -0400

Just in time for back to school ~~at Hogwarts~~, here is a drinking game!

It was emailed to me by an enigmatic reader known only as Aidan Optimus Maximus. That’s how you know that it’s boss.

[As a quiet aside, because I am a middle aged mother trapped in the body of a student, a warning: drink responsibly, and only do so if you’re of age. Seriously, be careful.]

Please allow me to present:

The 300 Drinking Game!

Basically every time one hears a line taken directly from a primary source (ie. “Fight in the shade”, or “come back with your shield, or on it”) you yell “Herodotus!” And everyone takes a drink. In the event of a disputed quotation the one who shouted “Herodotus!” is responsible for finding the quotation in a scholarly source.

If the disputed shouter can find the source quotation on a web-based resource such as the Perseus Project, the disputer must finish their drink. If the shouter can quickly find the source in print, the disputer must take a shot after finishing his/her drink. Other shots may be required if the disputed shouter can find more than one corroborative primary source (ie. A line that shows up in both Herodotus’ and Plutarch’s writings).

If a dispute stands, the errant shouter must finish his/her drink and face ridicule from colleagues for succumbing to the allure of modern-day pop-culture Laconophilia.”

[Thanks again to Aidan for this fantastic email. Here’s FYAH’s contact info!]

Alexand--NOPE.

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:43:00 -0400

Oh, Alexander.

So after that whole Gladiator shindig, I got a recommendation that I watch this movie and do the same thing. I’ve lived my whole life happily avoiding this film and Angelina Jolie’s painfully bad accent. But I tried, guys. I really did try. And there will come a day that I see this movie in full.

But it was not this day.

LOL NOPE.

I have a guilty pleasure for most historical movies, but I could not handle this one. Within the first twenty-five minutes, here are the glaring inaccuracies I came across:

Nothing was painted. I know this is typical of historical films but REALLY JUST THROW SOME ROUGE ON THAT STATUE
And then they committed a heinous crime: they restyled the Alexander fresco so that it looked like Colin Farrell
Movie version:
The original:
Also, Anthony Hopkins’ map was all in Latin
Alexander had an Irish accent
His horde was apparently the Ancient Troupe of the Sexy Short Skirts
Jared Leto’s hair
Alexander’s battle helmet is like a massive KILL ME FIRST sign

Anyway let’s talk about King Porus instead.

King who?

When Alex was at the top of his game and his men had been out of Greece for ten years, he decided that India was nice this time of year, and decided to conquer it.

India’s, uh, pretty big.

But this is Alexander the Great, and you don’t get that kinda title by twiddling your thumbs all day. You get that kind of title with a massive frigging army and—if the movie is any indication—some seriously excellent hair. Remember this (the army thing; not the hair). It’s important later.

Alexander was the reputation-proceeds kind of guy, so when he got to the Indian subcontinent he sauntered on up to the hill clans of what is now Pakistan and was all “You, me, BFF, oui?”. And the hill clans were mostly like LOL NOPE which probably took some serious balls. Remember, Alex had already conquered all of Persia at this point, and had at least 46,000 men standing behind him.

Imagine that all these people were holding swords, and imagine that you were telling them ‘no’.

So Alex attacked them, because forced submission was pretty much the only diplomatic strategy he knew. During the ensuing battles, Alexander was twice wounded. It took great effort on his army’s part to conquer the hill clans, but eventually did. Then they crossed the Indus river.

Artist’s representation. Based on movie logic, see if you can find Alexander!

What followed was the Battle of Hydaspes in 326BCE.

(For the sake of geographical correctness, a quick aside: the location of the battle was actually in modern-day Pakistan. A city was founded here following the the battle, called Nicaea, which hasn’t been discovered. Because of drastic geographical changes, we aren’t even really sure where the battle happened. Bummer.)

King Porus was the dude standing in Alex’s way. Porus was a powerful Punjabi leader who was like six feet tall (height was rare in ancient times; this guy would have seemed to be a giant), and Alex needed to conquer him to retain the following of the hill clans. Porus wanted his people to remain free of Alex’s control.

Also, Porus had elephants.

The elephants got all up in the face of Alex’s cavalry (elephant > horse), but eventually got exhausted and peaced, leaving Porus’ men surrounded by Alex’s phalanx and cavalry. Which, you know, not the best place to be, all things considered.

Porus and his men then fought so damn well that even Alexander was impressed. They lost, but instead of being entirely annexed, Alex kept Porus as the leader of Hydaspes. Even after Alex’s death three years later, Porus retained kingship of the area.

Alex, meanwhile, was all WHEE THAT WAS FUN LET’S KEEP GOING and his army was like LOL NO. Exhausted and homesick, his army revolted. They turned east for Greece. Many of his men would die on the return journey. Alexander would succumb to fever/poison/malaria in Babylon at the age of 32.

GLADIATOR: A Very Long Synopsis Brought to You By Caffeine.

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:58:33 -0400

So once upon a time oh my god so long ago, the kindly nihilseddeus suggested that it would be cool if we compared popular interactions with history—like films like Gladiator, for example—with the scholarly version of what happened.

Awesome idea, except (this is embarrassing) I had never seen Gladiator. So I watched it, just for you.

**Warning: Spoilers and Gratuitous Swearing Ahead**

AND JUMP CUT

So the movie begins with ~~Russell Crowe~~ Maximus being all manly in Germania whilst leading the Roman cavalry. They’re fighting the barbarian hordes, who are portrayed as violent, brutal madmen.

Fact check! The barbarians are always portrayed as violent, brutal madmen. It’s important to remember that our ideas of the barbarians come to us mostly from the Romans…you know, those guys who made beating barbarians to a pulp a full-time job. For centuries.

Anyways, the Romans are all AAAARRRRHHHHHH and the barbarians are all UUUUURRRRRRGGGGGG and then the Romans win. Obviously.

IMMA P-I-M-P.

These wars were a pretty big deal, back in the day, and they were lorded over by the emperor, Marcus Aurelius. He is my homeboy. Marcus was a philosopher who questioned the morality of Roman actions in Germania. He made a pretty column to show how the barbarians suffered at Roman hands. Basically, the worst thing about Marcus was that his son Commodus was fucking bonkers.

Life imitating art!

Movie!Marcus is all GET THIS KID AWAY FROM MY ROME and names Maximus, the respected general, his successor until the Senate gets its shit together. Maximus doesn’t want to be emperor, because he wants to go back home to Spain and have a beer and grill something on the barbecue. Commodus, who wants to play king, has a fit and murders his daddy, instead.

This…this didn’t happen. Like, at all.

By the time Marcus Aurelius died (in Vienna, by the way), he had already named Commodus caesar and co-emperor. He probably knew that his kid was off his rocker, but he also knew that doing anything else would result in civil war. Marcus did it for Rome.

But back to the movie, because now the proverbial shit hits the allegorical fan.

Commodus totally ignores his father’s wishes, names himself emperor, and then—because he’s a little bitch—orders Maximus’ execution.

Then, because he is a goddamn monster, he orders the death of Maximus’ wife and young son.

Meanwhile, Maximus gets stabbed a couple times and escapes his captors, because he is a Big Damn Hero. He steals some horse and commences riding said horse. Also, dying.

He rides all the fuck the way to Spain, where he finds his wife and son’s bodies charred, probably naked, and crucified in the remains of his villa. He buries them, lies down in front of their graves (WRONG! ROMANS BURNED THEIR DEAD!) and continues with that whole ‘dying’ thing.

It is an exceptionally sad scene, so here is a picture of Russell Crowe in costume being a doofus.

But this guy’s luck is seriously shit, because instead of getting to get dead, he gets found by some slave traders who happen to be strolling by, and he is healed back to health by Djimon Hounsou, who is in approximately 78% of all the movies that I love.

And then he gets sold to a gladiator coach in North Africa.

All in all, this is a pretty shitty existence. The role of slave gladiators was to die. They were basically target practice for the dudes who were actually good at this shit. The stars got to beat the daylights out of some poor captured sap, the crowd got their blood and circus, and everyone went home happy or dead.

But this is Movie Land, and Maximus is one tough motherfucker. He proves his BAMFness and the crowd adores him and his coach is all TO ROME!

Apparently all roads lead there?

Meanwhile, Commodus has turned Rome into ONE GIANT PARTY and everyone is having a grand old time watching slaves and Christians and wild animals get murdered in the Colosseum (WHICH WAS THE FLAVIAN AMPHITHEATER BACK THEN, MAN I CRINGE EVERY TIME I HEAR THEM CALL IT THE COLOSSEUM).

They lead Maximus’ troupe into the arena to reenact the Battle of Carthage (…except it’s actually the Battle of Zana) and Maximus’ gang very inconsiderately does not die. And then Commodus wants to meet them and when Maximus refuses to show him his face, Commodus gets whiny and commands him to turn around.

And then Maximus delivers a truly epic verbal smackdown.

“Also, your mother was a hamster.”

Commodus feels pretty murdery, but the crowd likes Maximus’ extraordinary killing skills, so no one gets shanked yet. Maximus, who decides he’s not done taunting the emperor, then refuses to kill his next gladiatorial opponent. Commodus goes home to sulk like a baby.

Historically speaking, I would like to again remind the audience, none of this actually happened. Commodus was a little turd who thought that he was Hercules incarnate. He was actually kind of a wuss and a crybaby. Contemporary writers didn’t really like him. And sometimes he dressed up like a gladiator and fought in the arenas, much to the disgust of like, all of Rome. Apparently everyone just refused to kill him, because he got to keep on being gross for a long time.

Back to the movie! Maximus and his old servant reunite and arrange to start a revolution in Rome. It involves Commodus’ sister, which is beautiful, because historically, she did arrange to have Commodus killed. Historically, her plan failed. So does this movie one. Basically everyone dies, and then Maximus gets recaptured.

Then this happens, to give the fangirls something to talk about.

Aaaaand because Commodus is continuing to be a little bitch, he stabs Maximus in the lung and then challenges him to a duel.

I just hate you so much.

But this is Hollywood! And Maximus wins! And Rome is saved! And the Senate gets power back! Even though Maximus dies of his injuries, he did it for the people and everything was just peachy afterwards!

Yeah, right.

Commodus was actually strangled to death in his bath in 192AD. He suffered damnatio memoriae, which means that Romans erased any evidence of his existence (this was reversed some years later by Septimus Severus, who deified him to legitimize his own reign). Mad chaos followed Commodus’ death: Rome was not given back to the people. In fact, it got kind of dangerous. In one year, there were five (!!) emperors.

Eventually, Septimius Severus rose to power, and the tragically tumultuous Severan Dynasty began.

But whatever: the movie is awesome.

The Ancient Pueblo Peoples

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 10:43:00 -0400

Recently, an anon left us a message asking if we could do a write-up about the Ancient Pueblo Peoples. Why yes we can, anon. Since our knowledge of the Pueblo Peoples is limited (basically there was a The Weekenders episode that mentioned Mesa Verde National Park and that’s about as far as our knowledge extends), we trotted off around the vast internets, and were consequently blown away by what we learned. So, we made a list of amazing facts.

Shut up; this show was awesome.

This culture emerged in the 12th century BCE.
HOLY SHIT SON. That’s frigging old. Not only is it old, it predates just about all the major civilizations of the Western world. The Mycenaeans were just beginning to get their shit together, the Trojan War was still a century away, and the Roman Empire was still a fever dream.

Around this time, the Ancient Pueblos were semi-nomadic, camping out in the open or making some bachelor pads in caves depending on the season. They were just just just beginning cultivation. Maize was a staple crop (FUN FACT: the word ‘corn’ actually refers to the stable crop in whatever region of the world you find yourself. Therefore, in so-called New World archaeology, maize is the corn. In the Old World, barley or wheat or whatever is the corn). They also had squash. They had strong hand tools and were champs at basket weaving.
They left behind some pretty rocking (PUN INTENDED) cave dwellings.
So in about 900CE, when the Pueblos were getting really settled in what is now Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, they started building some pretty fantastic dwellings. Look at these places:

They shaped the bricks for these structures out of mud and dry organic matter and let it dry in the sun. You had to access a lot of these places by engaging in some serious acrobatics, making these houses among the sweetest (and most defensible) ancient dwellings this archaeology student has come across.

They’re basically super-sophisticated permanent tree houses, except in caves. That is awesome.
Ancient Pueblo pottery was gorgeous.
Ancient pottery from any region of the world is important because it denotes social change. When you’re not busy outrunning saber-toothed tigers or killing mastodons for meat, you suddenly find yourself with more time to, you know, get artsy. New styles of decoration or new ink pigments can also show changes in trade, or migration. Clay vessels: a helluva lot more important than you might think.

The art of pottery decorating started in the Pueblo culture around 500CE. Pottery basically acted as the ancient world’s Tupperware, but that didn’t stop the Pueblos from creating some beauties:
THEY HAD A HIGHWAY.
This one blew me away. The Pueblo road system was extensive: archaeologists have found evidence of eight major roads stretching 300km (!!!) with highways averaging 30ft wide. The roads were serious infrastructure projects: some had what amount to guardrails.

These roads led to places such as water sources or mountaintops, probably because high areas equated to places of worship (we see this kind of thing around the world: on Crete, religious shrines have been found on the highest mountains). Obviously, these roads would have also been paramount to trade.
Shit went down in the 12th and 13th centuries CE.
Around this time, the whole world was in crisis mode. The Little Ice Age caused famine and havoc in Europe, and almost definitely would have had an affect on the Pueblos. With everyone moving around and getting in each others’ territory, there was bound to be some conflict arising.
…cannibals?
There is some (highly controversial; hotly debated) evidence that consequent to the societal collapse, some ancient people in the southwest may have engaged in cannibalism. Skeletons were found in ‘97 that had undergone extreme violence, but whether or not cannibalism is the explanation for this find is hard to say.

There have been cultures around the world that ritualistically practiced cannibalism, but if we slapped the label on every culture that showed evidence of violence or hinted at the act, we’d probably be way off our mark.
So much more research needs to be done.
We don’t know what language the Ancient Pueblos spoke. We don’t know if they had writing. We don’t know their cultural system. Like so much of the world in general and the ‘New World’ in particular, our knowledge base is tiny compared to what we could still learn. Archaeology is key here: we learn about the past by what they leave behind.

Lucky for us, the Ancient Pueblos left behind some freaking amazing stuff.

AVE! THIS IS YOUR FAVORITE MILITARY DICTATOR REPORTING IN, LITTLE GAULS. YOU HAVE A WONDERFUL BLOG THAT DESERVES FOLLOWING.
PEACE OUT

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:03:21 -0400

We here at FYAH get a lot of really incredible messages. We keep them because they make us smile. We get book recommendations. We get questions. We get notes that are so kind our little nerdy eyes well up with tears and violin music starts playing and it’s all rather touching.

And then sometimes, we get a message from Caesar in da Hood.

So we want to say thank-you, again, for being amazing, amazing readers. More posts to come! Big changes to come! Party times and happiness and puppies and rainbows and cupcakes and sunshine for you all!

PEACE OUT, LITTLE GAULS.