The finest of china, found in a Goodwill in Los Angeles, CA
I regret not buying it
Me every winter
This Just In: Giant Beast Gingerly Eats Dandelions. More at 11.
in honor of gar week! did you know gars are prehistoric?? i wish i was prehistoric…
Fired clay brick from the ziggurat at Ur; Ur-Nammu no. 1; cuneiform inscription stamped on face with two accidentally impressed dog’s paw-marks near one edge.
hey guys can you help me find that old portrait of a girl holding a little painting of a naked dude and cracking up about it?? I want to say it’s by Rembrandt but that’s probably not right
It’s “Smiling Girl, a Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image” by Gerard van Honthorst!!
It’s the best painting that exists
I don’t know about you, but I really want to know what’s written on there - wait, I found a higher res image, can anyone translate this?
also it’s kind of an amazing little vignette
Hahahaa
Okay it says “who knows my arse from behind” and I will never recover from this
OKAY— so i LOVE this painting, it’s in the St. Louis Art Museum, and on a tour i found out the story. it’s not a naked dude, at all. It’s actually a smaller depiction of her, she’s a sex worker! She’s showing off her advertising for her services. It’s a really cool historical example of sex work, and a gorgeous painting to see in person.
So that grin is her going:
“That’s me!!”
bat mosaic at the rijksmuseum you are all i think about 💖
[image description: a mosaic of a smiling bat flying in front of a full moon. end id]
Jacob Janerka, Hello, this is crab…
now i’m falling asleep and she’s calling a crab
urbanfantasyinspiration
SPOON OF SHAME
hi, ummm. this is awkward. haha. yeah um do you think you could push your boulder up somewhere else? like a different hill? because this one’s kind of already taken. yeah it’s the one i’ve decided to die on, so.
yeah thanks. um and if you see that woman who sometimes comes running up here could you tell her that i’m- yeah the one who makes all those deals with god. yeah. could you tell her this is the hill i’m dying on and she needs to find a different one? fuck hang on i can see those two kids with that pail of water again give me a second-
there is no better feeling than to be wholly trusted and loved by a little animal
Glass pomegranate. Greek, Hellenistic period, 2nd c.BC. Phoenix Museum.
The Iliad and the Odyssey were written down around 800 BCE, but the events they are describing supposedly happened around the 13th century BCE.
(Pause here and marvel for a moment at the idea of cultural memory of a great war persisting as an oral tradition for 500 years, morphing over the centuries from whatever real event may have been to the myth we know today.)
And then consider this- no one in the Iliad or the Odyssey are ever described as reading or writing anything.
Why?
Because the period of time between the fall of Mycenean civilization (which used linear B) in the 11th century BCE and when the Iliad and the Odyssey were written (in Ancient Greek) was a "dark age" where as far as we can tell, cities and palaces were abandoned, most trade routes collapsed, and written language was *completely lost*. It wasn't until about 800BCE that a totally new writing system had to be basically imported from the Phoenicians and adapted into ancient Greek.
Their whole culture just kind of collapsed for a few hundred years, preserving their stories through oral tradition for CENTURIES, until they scrapped together a totally different God damn alphabet to write with.
So none of the characters in the Iliad or the Odyssey can read because as far Homer knew, this whole writing thing was *pretty fucking new*
There actually IS one mention of writing in homer, it's just not one of the characters *doing* the writing themselves! The hero Glaucus in iliad VI.150-170 tells the story of his ancestor the hero Bellerophon, who made the wife of his host, king Proetus, fall in love with him. When Proetus notices this, he sends Bellerophon to his wife's father with a TABLET, carrying the message that he should kill his messenger:
πέμπε δέ μιν Λυκίην δέ, πόρεν δ᾽ ὅ γε σήματα λυγρὰ
γράψας ἐν πίνακι πτυκτῷ θυμοφθόρα πολλά,
δεῖξαι δ᾽ ἠνώγειν ᾧ πενθερῷ ὄφρ᾽ ἀπόλοιτο.
but he sent him to Lycia, and gave him baneful tokens, graving in a folded tablet many signs and deadly, and bade him show these to his own wife's father, that he might be slain. (Il. VI.168-170, trans. A.T. Murray)
This is the earliest post-dark ages reference to writing/greek script that we have!
Doesn't actually dispute your statement at all, because it's one tiny reference in massive narratives of non-writing, but just wanted to add it to show that there was SOME idea of previous writing known to homer!
Vivaldi played by the South African elementary school Goede Hoop Marimba Band
Turn ON the sound
jd-kickdrum-deactivated20220908
AMAZING
Slow down, turn on the sound and take a couple of minutes to enjoy this!
