Map of regional rug patterns of Iran.

This map is actually accurate. If you go to its source, WikiRug and click on each province, it will direct you to a wikirug page about that particular rug.

textile

Cultures/periods: Chimu

Production date: 900-1430

Made in: Peru

Provenience unknown, possibly looted

British Museum

fragments of time, 1st century B.C - 200 A.D

Traditional clothing from Razlog Valley, Bulgaria

📸 Bulgarian roots

A Roman doll with moveable joints and accessories was found in the sarcophagus of Crepereia Tryphaena, an unmarried 20-year-old woman. The sarcophagus is dated to the late 100s (2nd c. AD) making the ivory “Crepereia Doll” nearly two thousand years old.

@satans-poptarts excellent tags

She wrote it about HER girlfriend!

lmao god, english upper class people... I was reading Mathilda, and there's all these monologues about the protagonist going insane from loneliness and not knowing how to act when she finally strikes up a friendship again; she has retired to a cottage in the woods and is essentially in hiding. All this time we're given the impression that she is utterly alone in that cottage. Much woe about the completeness of her loneliness. and then.

what do you mean your servant ...? in your cottage in the woods where you were so utterly alone? that one?

pt 2, this time Frankenstein by the same. Said Frankenstein is greatly relieved when he returns and the 'apartment was empty' because this means his monster has fled. but then

...did that servant materialise out of thin air to bring him food in his room. The place not actually empty, just empty of people of his own class. he just left the servant and his monster with each other while he was out.

Eventually the monster was like "well this is awkward. I'm out." and the servant presumably just filed the encounter under "weird shit upper class people do" and went on with his life.

I remember taking this college elective on film adaptations and we talked about the controversy caused by the PBS adaptation of Emma, which made a point of putting servants in every. single. scene, confronting the audience with the reality that the main characters are surrounded by servants constantly and are choosing not to acknowledge their presence. Emma is consoling her "poor" friend Harriet over her misfortune and the entire time a servant is standing there silently brushing Emma's hair or some shit. Virtually every other adaptation of Emma does a very good job of invisiblizing the constant presence of the working class labor force that allowed these people to live the way they did.

If anyone is interested the murder mystery Gosford Park specifically explored this phenomenon. Roger Ebert did a review of it here.

oh like that point in The Hound of the Baskervilles when Sherlock Holmes is living in a hut on the moors completely alone. with his valet. who makes sure he’s shaved every morning.

The Herculaneum papyri are more than 1800 papyri that were carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius (79 CE), constituting the only surviving library from antiquity that exists in its entirety. Now using new x-ray technique, these scrolls are being read for the first time in millennia

An article by the Smithsonian about it:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/buried-ash-vesuvius-scrolls-are-being-read-new-xray-technique-180969358/

I was getting pretty fed up with links and generators with very general and overused weapons and superpowers and what have you for characters so:

Here is a page for premodern weapons, broken down into a ton of subcategories, with the weapon’s region of origin. 

Here is a page of medieval weapons.

Here is a page of just about every conceived superpower.

Here is a page for legendary creatures and their regions of origin.

Here are some gemstones.

Here is a bunch of Greek legends, including monsters, gods, nymphs, heroes, and so on. 

Here is a website with a ton of (legally attained, don’t worry) information about the black market.

Here is a website with information about forensic science and cases of death. Discretion advised. 

Here is every religion in the world. 

Here is every language in the world.

Here are methods of torture. Discretion advised.

Here are descriptions of the various methods used for the death penalty. Discretion advised.

Here are poisonous plants.

Here are plants in general.

Feel free to add more to this!

An exceedingly useful list of lists for writers.

Villagers in Polesia region, Belarus celebrate Shchedry Vecher (Generous Eve), the Orthodox New Years Eve which has remnants of the ancient pre-Christian Slavic festival of Kolyada.

Source: http://www.rodnovery.ru/en/articles/868-kolyada

A Hutsul family in Ukraine attend Christmas Eve Dinner. In Ukrainian, Polish, and Rusyn cultures Christmas Eve is one of the most important nights of the year. Families gather together and consume a dinner consisting of twelve meals representing the twelve Apostles of Jesus. The meals are not allowed to consist of meat, except for fish. Typical dishes among both Ukrainians and Poles are meatless Pirogi/Pierogi, Kutia, Carp, Pickled Herring, Poppy-seed cakes, Cabbage based meals including Cabbage rolls, and Borscht

Attitudes towards women in American and Soviet advertising

Go ahead and do your own research - put these Soviet ads through a translator app like I just did!

You'll see that they aren't advertising a product like in the English language images. They are propaganda. And the propaganda is very cool and the art slaps, as Soviet propaganda always does.

But this is not an equal comparison.

It just irritates me when leftists simplify things like this. "American capitalism sexist and bad" vs. "USSR feminist and good". It's not that black and white, and even if it was, this image set does not show that at all. All it shows is that Soviet art is the best.

I chose these adverts because the USSR didn’t really have product advertising in the way that the west did. If a factory had a surplus of goods they may be advertised, or there were some adverts for products such as cars to help to stop the hoarding of money (caused by over-printing of cash). As the state controlled most advertising, the line between propaganda and advertising was blurred. But we can also compare propaganda. US propaganda was usually negative, and focused on fear of the enemy or fear of reprisal. Whereas soviet advertisements were usually focused on a positive message such as looking to the future and overcoming obstacles. Again, you will always find exceptions, this is just a generalisation, and of course it varies by era.

The original intent of the post was to show the difference in attitudes towards women in both countries in the past. The USSR, for all of its flaws, did genuinely try to improve the lives of women. I’d even argue, post 1950, that the average woman in the USSR had more freedom and opportunities than the average woman in the USA during the same period. Even now, after the fall of the USSR, there are millions of highly educated women doing jobs way beneath their skills. Street sweepers who once helped develop rockets, shop clerks who once worked with nuclear energy, hotel cleaners who once were architects. Most ex-Warsaw Pact countries have a lot more women in STEM, even now, because of the efforts of the communist governments of old.

I’ve been reading about Soviet history lately and a really interesting fact about the post ww2 Soviet Union is that they had a hugely un-proportionate ratio of men and women. In 1950 there were 60 men to 100 women, compared to USA’s ratio in 1950 98.7 to 100. Meaning that the Soviet Union really relied on women to fill the gap in the workforce which I think likely contributed to this sort of propaganda.

Italian ambassadors shocked by English culture in the 16th C

“Both Magno and Litolfi are agreed on what they perceive to be the extraordinary freedoms enjoyed by women in England, most notably the ability to socialize on their own with whomever they please. Litolfi sees English women who:

Both accounts call attention to the kissing habits of the English, shocked and titillated as they are by being practiced ‘‘in the middle of the street as at home.’’ Magno describes a street game in which young women:

Strange that a social custom now associated so much more with the Mediterranean world would have taken Italian visitors by such surprise in England at this time.”

—

Except from: Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England, pg. 119-20

It’s reasons like this- and the fact that England had a lower homicide rate than Italy, and eagerly taught ancient languages and was very involved in Renaissance humanism- that I dislike the recent portrayal of Tudor England in historical fiction as being a muddy cultural backwater full of unfriendly hicks. I think that portrayal of Tudor England is more to do with authors’ dislike of modern England than actual history.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying 16th century England was great. It was still patriarchal. London was dirty and a small city compared to cities on the continent. England wasn’t important enough for people to bother learning English. England adopted continental fashions, not the other way around. Also Italians noticed that the English had a tendency to xenophobia. And the famous rain. But at the same time, I think it’s unfair to portray Tudor England as Undeniably The Worst Country in Early Modern Europe.

Absolutely. Let me also highlight once more this quote from Giovanni Michiel in 1557:

So this idea that England was dirt poor, culturally homogenous and irrelevant in European politics until Elizabeth is entirely false because Giovanni was writing during Mary’s reign. 

And we also have to remember that ambassadors and people who wrote home about England were human - descriptions of England will always be tinged by personal preference. For example, Magno was writing during Elizabeth’s reign and described London as: 

Where as Litolfi, writing during Mary’s reign has a less favourable view: 

But at the same time Litolfi was not physically well during his stay in illness and his illness may have coloured his impression. He seemed, however, to enjoy the weather, writing that England had: 

Wyatt, the author of this book posits that for an Italian used to extremely hot, muggy weather, England’s more mild climate might have literally felt like a breath of fresh air to him. 

tl;dr: writing England as grey, savage backwater of a country in Tudor fiction is boring and inaccurate lmao

#also ‘English food is bad’ is a modern stereotype

This is the LAST TIME I’ll reblog this I promise lol but this is so true as well. Wyatt writes that:

Note that Litolfi is not saying English food is bad, rather he’s just shocked at the amount of meat (and fish) consumed. Which has more to do with English fisheries and agricultural production than anything. 

Also I can confirm I’ve had “re-enacted” Tudor-style food and it is SCRUMPTIOUS far more flavourful and seasoned than most modern English dishes.

beaker

Cultures/periods: Nasca

Production date: 100BC-600

Findspot: Nazca

Provenience unknown, possibly looted

British Museum

The amount of time that the Ancient Egyptian civilisation lasted is just so mind boggling. It lasted over 3000 years. That's such an insane amount of time. It ended around 30BC meaning that it will only be extinct for as long as it existed in around 950 years. Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of bitcoin than the building of the pyramids of Giza. They were already ancient to her. What the fuck

We have a records from the time of Ramses II of ancient Egyptians doing archeology on monuments that were already a thousand years old to them.

ancient egyptian archeologists. ancient egyptian archeologists. excuse me i have to go lay down and think about things