Me: can anyone tell me what big disaster in the middle of the 1300s destroyed the existing world system of trade?
My class: *silence*
Me: *draws this on the board*
My class: *5 people put their hands up at once*
Who would win? a longstanding system of cross-civilization trade spanning from sub-Saharan Africa to East Asia, predating the rise of the European “global empires” by centuries, or
I love how humans have literally not changed throughout history like the graffiti from Pompeii has people from hundreds of years ago writing stuff like “Marcus is gay” “I fucked a girl here” “Julius your mum wishes she was with me” and leonardo da vinci’s assistants drew dicks in their notebooks just for the banter and mozart created a piece called “kiss my ass” so when people wish for ‘today’s generation’ to be like ‘how people used to’ then we’re already there buddy we’ve always been
The Hagia Sophia has inscriptions that were considered sacred for centuries until they were deciphered in the 70s to be Nordic runes saying “Halfdan wrote this”
my old english prof told us that theres a cave in Scandinavia where a viking gratified some runes like 14 feet up on the wall and when they finally reached it all it translated into was “this is very high”
Ancient Shitposting
Now on the History Channel
‘People have literally just always been people’ is genuinely my favorite fact about the world
“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 BC – 43 BC
so not nearly as old but, this is a 12th century stave church in lom, norway (one of less than 40 left in the world)
it’s hard to see, but in the top left corner of this photo where the light comes in from the window, there’s a runic inscription
these photos show it more clearly, it’s easier to see in person. so of course one of the people i was travelling with asked what it said, and we were told it basically translates to:
“on this day, I climbed to this point, in the corner of the church”
Everybody talks about Anastasia, which is a shame, because it’s a far less interesting example of Russian fake heir drama than that whole business with the False Dmitries.
Okay, so Ivan the Terrible’s youngest son,
Dmitry, was assassinated in 1591 at the age of 8. Fast-forward nine years, and there’s a guy going about Eastern Europe claiming that he is Dmitry, having secretly escaped the assassination attempt and lived in hiding under a false identity ever since. This sort of business isn’t too unusual, but this guy actually pulls it off, managing to gain the Russian throne and rule for nearly eleven months before being dragged from the palace and publicly executed in early 1606. He’d subsequently go down in history as False Dmitry I.
Here’s where it gets interesting. In mid 1607, a second impostor declares himself. Bizarrely, this one doesn’t dispute the first impostor’s legitimacy; instead, he claims to be the same guy, having miraculously survived his apparent execution the year before. He somehow wins the political support of False Dmitry I’s widow, and with her vouching for his identity, he gains the allegiance of the Cossacks, rallies an army over 100 000 strong, and tries to “take back” the throne. Though his march on Moscow ultimately failed, he successfully conquered most of Southeastern Russia, which he would rule until his untimely death in December of 1610, when he was beheaded in a drunken altercation with a Tartar prince. The history books know him as False Dmitry II.
Now jump ahead three months to March of 1611, when a third fucking impostor pops up. Dude apparently just magically appeared from behind a waterfall in goddamn Ivangorod and declared himself Tsar. Following the lead of False Dmitry II, he doesn’t dispute either of the two previous impostors, instead claiming some sort of spiritual reincarnation and/or magical resurrection – it’s not entirely clear which – to establish himself as the same guy. He must have talked a good game, because he managed to win the support of the same fucking Cossacks who supported False Dmitry II’s claim. Unfortunately, he was a far less able commander, being forced to flee his stronghold only a year later, whereupon he was spirited away to Moscow and secretly executed. Though he never managed to actually rule anything, historians decided to stick to the theme and dubbed him False Dmitry III.
At this point the historical record becomes confused, with some sources asserting there was a fourth False Dmitry, though others insist that the third False Dmitry was simply counted twice due to poor record-keeping. Still, whether we’re talking about three False Dmitries or four, imagine the whole mess from the Tsar’s perspective. Dude just wouldn’t stay dead!
O sultan, Turkish devil and damned devil’s kith and kin, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight are thou, that canst not slay a hedgehog with your naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou shalt not, thou son of a whore, make subjects of Christian sons; we have no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee, fuck thy mother.
Thou Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria, swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, pig of Armenia, Podolian thief, catamite of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets, and fool of all the world and underworld, an idiot before God, grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our dick. Pig’s snout, mare’s arse, slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow, screw thine own mother!
So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife. You won’t even be herding pigs for the Christians. Now we’ll conclude, for we don’t know the date and don’t own a calendar; the moon’s in the sky, the year with the Lord, the day’s the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse!
– Koshovyi otaman Ivan Sirko, with the whole Zaporozhian Host.”
Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire
In case anyone needed a dramatic reading of the above historical letter.
I’m dying!
Oh my god.
I’m now dying to know what happened next.
Period invective at its finest, even if it may not be quite as period as you think.
(NB – Peter Capaldi’s reading is probably NSFW without headphones.)
Here’s a link to much larger versions of the painting. Take a look at the full-size one: the facial expressions are a treat.
Also, check out Repin’s later, revised but uncompleted “sketch” version, which seems to have Vlad Dracula as a guest star just right of centre.
Listening to Capaldi’s reading you can really imagine this crowd of bros around a table yelling at the guy with the pen not to forget their favourite insult.
My bros I have been doing a lot of
reading about Wacky WWII Hijinks lately and I want to tell you a
story because I love it okay
once upon a time there was a dude in
Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol
hated him some goddamn fascists.
See Spain had recently ended its civil
war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in
Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy
buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty
bullshit
so soon after war breaks out Pujol
travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on
the Nazis for you”
“who the fuck are you?” say the
British, and kick him out
but Pujol is not deterred! He still
wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German embassy instead. “hey” he
says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”
“yeah
okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”
and
just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German
intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and
such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his
way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later
writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England
Pujol
had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon
public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books
and set about just wholesale making shit up
this
is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely
did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were
basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen,
because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of
wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so
that’s probably the same right?
Here
is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves
this. “wow this dude is a
great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been
the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new
awesome spy that the British start to get worried
you
see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly
unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by
reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio
transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and
reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England.
The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by
parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept
the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed
in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies
so
there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a
prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as
double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking
up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great
spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail
“oh
shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they
have to and from this mysterious super spy.
“hey
wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending.
“someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”
At
this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the
British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally
an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t
interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again. It wasn’t until MI5 started
asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we
know that guy”
so in
1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially
becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case
officer so he can start making up even better bullshit
and he
does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d
recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to
disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+
sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK
none of these people actually exist
Pujol
just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of
their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of
MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but
ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive
in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy
network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents
Pujol,
now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a
huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge
intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of
attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation
Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII
Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended
crazily
enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent.
After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which
require personal authorization from Hitler), and a
Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)
unable
to resist being totally fucking ridiculous,
Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this
time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own
death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”
and
that’s exactly what he did. Juan Garcia Pujol died in 1988, at the
age of 76
Okay I’m just editing my reblog to add this picture of Juan Pujol Garcia because I feel that it adds so much to the story to picture him doing ALL THE ABOVE with this expression:
What a legend.
Thank you Jess for this extremely important addendum.
he’s my hero and also adorable
This is…holy fucking shit, I have no words for how much glee this story brings me. It’s like Mother Night but not soul-crushing
He was Catalan and his real name was Joan (not Juan) Pujol i Garcia.
After the fascists won the Spanish Civil War, Spanish names were mandatory, since the Catalan language and culture were completely banned by the fascist regime, but he referred to himself as Joan. So let’s refer to him as Joan as he would have wanted, and not use the name that the Spanish fascists imposed.
Here’s an interesting interview with him from the year 1984 (in Catalan)
Your players are faced with an ancient Sumerian curse! However, since the early ancient Sumerian language was only used for recording tax debts, it turns out to actually be an ancient Sumerian bill.
and therefore they need to get hold of some ancient Sumerian coinage and bring it to the ruins of the ancient Sumerian tax office, because the Sumerians had a pleasingly direct way of preventing tax evasion, namely horrifying curses.
well I don’t have any coin but I have these copper ingots, lovely copper ingots, from a very reputable merchant, never heard a word said against him, very thorough with his paperwork, anyway they’re guaranteed pure copper and proper weight, so can I pay my tax with those?
I just want everyone to take a step back for a second and really think about how we’re using the most powerful knowledge tool in history to make jokes about a specific dude who lived almost 4000 years ago.
yeah i remmeber that was a few years ago. after that happened like a few months or osmething idk i went to a game at the ACC (bruins/leafs) and there was a person there in a bee costume with a sign that had tuukka’s name on and everything.
I didn’t believe this so I looked it up. Apparently yes.
vikings made their woman handle the finances because they thought math is witchcraft
During a military campaign, Vlad the Impaler, the basis for Dracula, once pulled his troops out of a major engagement in a valley at dusk so that the sun was in their enemies’ eyes. Once they were over the hill, they set loose a bunch of rabid bats who flew away from the sun (towards the enemy) and attacked them, leading to significant infection in their ranks, and Vlad’s eventual victory. Because of how the bats appeared from where Vlad’s soldiers appeared to be at dusk, myth stated that the soldiers turned into bats at night, which is where the “Dracula can change into a bat” thing came from.
raphael, the renaissance painter, literally fucked himself to death
during the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan Ibrahim I had 280 of his concubines drowned in the ocean after ONE of them slept with another man.
The earths carbon levels fell by 700 million tons because Genghis Khan killed so many people
King James (the one known for revising the Bible) liked to watch women give birth. That’s where the “tradition” of women laying on their backs to give birth comes from.
Previous to that it was common for women to have chairs with holes in them and straw underneath, so they could sit on this special chair and let gravity help with the birthing process.
Spicy foods were thought to increase libido and cause children to masturbate. To prevent kids from touching themselves at night, a man named Kellogg invented the blandest combination of cereals, marketed it at kids, and called it Corn Flakes
At the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War, a small group of Union soldiers had run out of ammo against a large group of the Confederate Army. In a panic, the Union soldiers sprinted at them, screaming, with only bayonets drawn. The entire Confederate Army that was present turned and ran away in fear, not knowing that they had literally no ammunition.
When the Roman Emperor Caligula went to invade Britain he stood on the coast of Gaul with his army and suddenly declared war on Neptune, God of the Sea. He had his men collect sea shells from the shore as “spoils from the Ocean”.
Oh and he appointed his horse to the senate.
During the Austro-Prussian war of 1868, Liechtenstein sent over an army of 80 people, but ended up coming back with 81 people because they befriended a guy on the other side.
People refused to send art and sculptures to be displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair because of Chicago’s history with fire. They had to fireproof the Fine Arts building to get people to agree to loan them their art. A year after the fair closed most of the grounds were destroyed by fire but the Fine Arts building survived. It’s now the Museum of Science and Industry.
The carbon emissions thing from Ghenghis Khan is not the whole story. He also planted trees wherever he conquered land because he liked trees and thought they were important. He conquered enough to make an impact on the global climate.
Radu III, brother of Vlad III( Vlad the Impaler) nearly killed Mehmed II, the future Sultan of the Ottoman’s, after Mehmed invited him up to his chambers. Radu, seemingly unaware that the offer was sexual in nature, was startled when Mehmed embraced and then tried to kiss him. Radu stabbed the prince in the leg, then ran and hid in a tree. They later became lovers, and maintained a relationship for the rest of their lives
Just googled the last one because holy shit that’s magnificent and seemed to good to be true, but not only did it actually happen, but I also learned that radu was known as “radu the beautiful”
Imagine how pissed you have to be to engrave a rock
Ok but there was this guy called Ea-nasir who was a total crook and would actually cheat people ought of good copper and sell them shit instead. The amount of correspondences complaining to and about this guy are HILARIOUS.
Are you telling me we know about a specific guy who lived 5000 years ago, by name, because he was a huge asshole
More like 4000 years ago but yes. Ea-nasir and his dodgy business deals.
And we haven’t even touched on the true hilarity of the situation yet. Consider two additional facts:
He wasn’t just into copper trading. There are letters complaining about Ea-nasir’s business practices with respect to everything from kitchenwares to real estate speculation to second-hand clothing. The guy was everywhere.
The majority of the surviving correspondences regarding Ea-nasir were recovered from one particular room in a building that is believed to have been Ea-nasir’s own house.
Like, these are clay tablets. They’re bulky, fragile, and difficult to store. They typically weren’t kept long-term unless they contained financial records or other vital information (which is why we have huge reams of financial data about ancient Babylon in spite of how little we know about the actual culture: most of the surviving tablets are commercial inventories, bills of sale, etc.).
But this guy, this Ea-nasir, he kept all of his angry letters – hundreds of them – and meticulously filed and preserved them in a dedicated room in his house. What kind of guy does that?
Okay, but imagine from the other guy’s point of view. You send angry letters about how Ea-nasir shipped you half a ton of subpar copper, and then 3800 years later—
Steel Phoenix Studios 
