A fun comic I made based off what I learned about the Julio-Claudians from my Art History class…Roman emperors were kind of hilarious, omg. They’re a bit more based off their likenesses than, say Himaruya’s emperor designs (but I like those too haha). I sent it to my Art History TA and she really liked it eheheh
hi everyone im still pissed we never learnt in school that shakespeare was bi and wrote the sonnets about a dude and a woc he was into
hi everyone im still pissed that we were told emily dickinson was a spinster when she spent her whole life writing love letters to a woman
hi everyone im still pissed about the fact that we never got taught any of the super super gay Greek myths. it seems impossible to think they managed to pick all the hetero myths when Greece was just THAT gay but guess what? they did.
hi everyone virginia woolf was also bi im still pissed that so much of literature is queer and has queer coding within it that deserves to be analysed through that lens in the same way that we don’t ignore the gender of an author, but sexuality is never mentioned in highschool literature classes
hi everyone i’m still pissed that we were never taught that da vinci was gay af and that the ideal the western world has of jesus (white, long straight brown hair) was based on one of his male lovers
hi everyone i’m still pissed that we were told sir isaac newton died a virgin when he had multiple boyfriends over the course of his life one of whom he wrote passionate love letters too and lived with
There are people out there trying to straightwashing fucking Sappho. Sappho os Lesbos, patron saint of all queer girls. Sorry I didn’t follow the format y’all had going. I’m just mad as hell about how they’re trying to do Sappho so dirty.
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.
To expand on this, Jesus’s name is Anglicized in this way as well. We get Jesus from the Latin form of the Greek “Ἰησοῦς”(Iēsous), which is derived from the Herbrew “ישוע”(Yeshu’a, which meant “YHWH is Salvaion”, YHWH, or Yahweh being the name of God). When another form of that name, ” יְהוֹשֻׁעַ”(Yeoshu’a) was allowed to Anglicize through a different set of corruptions, it entered the English Language through Reformist Protestants as the name “Joshua”.
This is true btw. I did a report about Ann Boney in school and Read actually liked her back so they ran away together and were considered the two most terrifying pirates across the seven seas
Lesbian Pirates
Give us this film
Just fyi – many of the illustrations and statues of them show them with their breasts exposed. This is not because they are sexualising lesbians but because these women often used to open their shirts and expose a breast when they killed a man just so the man’s dying thought would be the realisation that he was killed by a woman.
tits out for murder!!! a true aesthetic!!!
Throwing this out there, relationship labels are a weird place in history and I haven’t been avidly researching pirate history in a hot minute, but they also had a polyamorous relationship with Calico Jack Rackham (who Jack Sparrow was based on), and the three of them spent a number of years cruising around the Caribbean, taking over ships and gaining quite impressive reputations as pirates.
Anne Bonny’s gender would pretty much never be revealed to anyone but Rackham and Read, until their capture when Read and Bonny pleaded they were both pregnant to put off the death penalty. Read didn’t make it out of the prison, dying in childbirth I think, but Bonny did make it out.
Many people like to assume that all of history has been a progression from “it sucked back then because people were ignorant savages” to “everything’s great now!”
But honestly, that’s not how it works.
I mean, take Egypt. For many thousands of years, Egypt was…actually a pretty great place to live, and TBH women there had better rights than we enjoy in many parts of the world today. The medical care? They used techniques in Egypt 3,000 years ago that we’re looking at now and going “Okay so that actually has some legitimate points, maybe they knew what they were doing.”
(I mean, sure, they also used crocodile dung as a contraceptive, but hey, the Pill hadn’t been invented yet.)
The Scythians…again. Life with them? I’d be okay with it.
I mean, if you get salmonella, trichinosis and infection from C. pneumonia at once- all three of which Nile Crocodiles carry -you’re probably not gonna stay pregnant. This could potentially be because you are dead, but it does count.
True.
(They used it to make a pessiary, btw. They dried it, powdered it, and mixed it with honey and sodium carbonate, or what is now known as washing soda. Now, the honey and washing soda probably DID kill sperm, much like a modern spermicide, but the dung???? Yeah that didn’t do much.)
Other methods of Egyptian birth control involved condoms made of animal intestines (which were used more because they protected from VD’s, to be fair)
If you couldn’t get crocodile dung, ground unripe acacia fruit and honey could be used to make the spermicide. Unripe acacia fruit is acidic, (as is honey) and sperm are killed in acidic environments, so it probably did help.
Egypt was LEGENDARY for its advancement during that period of history! And compared to many other civilizations at the time, women were indeed in a very good place! I think they could even own property, own and run businesses, and divorce their husbands but I’m not sure. As a man you were expected to keep your wife happy and provide for her, I know that much.
But it’s even wilder. Get this: they had a pregnancy test. They would have a woman urinate on a handful of grain. If it sprouted, she was pregnant. If it didn’t, she wasn’t.
It was 70% accurate.
NO BUT LISTEN
WHAT THEY DID??? They moistened a grain of barley and a grain of emmer wheat with the possibly pregnant person’s urine. If the emmer alone sprouted, it was positive. If the barley sprouted, it was negative.
NOW HERE’S THE WILD PART; certain hormones in the urine of a pregnant human inhibit germination in barley.
WE’VE JUST NOW FIGURED THAT PART OUT
In ancient Egypt? They didn’t know why it worked. They just knew it DID.
I KNOW IT’S SO COOL
People don’t seem to really grasp the fact that this one civilization existed for more than half of recorded human history. They had plenty of time to figure this shit out and become one of the greatest civilizations ever.
I love them so much ;u;
“Living in Egypt for most of history would have been pretty good actually.” -My history teacher during “History; ancient to early modern, part 1″ in college.
Steel Phoenix Studios 
