January 2011
65 posts
The Inka empire and Qosqo, their capital.
(“Qosqo” is closer to the original Quechua than the “Cuzco” more familiar to English speakers).
In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger...
Genres of Tibetan literature.
This is from Cabezón and Jackson’s Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre (Snow Lion, 1996):
One of the most systematic arrangements is that of the works of the bKa’ brgyud pa master ‘Brug pa Padma dkar po (1527-1592), which is divided as follows:
I. Outer sciences.
A. Mundane sciences (medicine, astronomy, poetics, etc.)
B. History of Buddhism
C. Biographies
D. Guides to...
Merf. Thinking is Hard.: Want consequences? Let me... →
jhameia:
jessnevins:
redlightpolitics:
This is what happens when you uncritically present an article from someone saying “Educate me!”.
You are typing from a computer with internet access and you have access to Google or other similar search engines. But it is easier to ask. It is easier to have other…
Demanding that other people educate you—at least, in the sense meant here—does not...
Merf. Thinking is Hard.: Want consequences? Let me... →
redlightpolitics:
This is what happens when you uncritically present an article from someone saying “Educate me!”.
You are typing from a computer with internet access and you have access to Google or other similar search engines. But it is easier to ask. It is easier to have other…
Demanding that other people educate you—at least, in the sense meant here—does not spring...
Inca technology: a kind of rebuttal to Jared...
Although I may be reading too much into the following:
Andean cultures did make tools…but rather than making them out of steel, they preferred fiber. The choice is less odd than it may seem. Mechanical engineering depends on two main forces: compression and tension. Both are employed in European technology, but the former is more common—the arch is a classic example of compression....
The smallpox pandemic of the 1770s
In her book Pox Americana (2001), the Duke University historian Elizabeth Fenn meticulously pieced together evidence that the Western Hemisphere was visited by two smallpox pandemics shortly before and during the Revolutionary War. The smaller of the two apparently began outside Boston in early 1774 and lurked in the area for the next several years like a sniper, picking off victims at the rate...
Cahokia.
Anyone who traveled up the Mississippi in 1100 A.D. would have seen it looming in the distance—a four-level earthen mound bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Around it like echoes were as many as 120 smaller mounds, some topped by tall wooden palisades, which were in turn ringed by a network of irrigation and transportation canals; carefully located fields of maize; and hundreds of...
Pilot Officer John Henry Smythe (1915-1996). →
Speaking of movies…someone needs to make one of this man’s life.
Tall talk.
Interesting that some of these survive today in common discourse:
Tall talk. A species of “expansive eloquence” and strong language—racy, picturesque, and boisterous—identified with the Southern and Western American backwoods and frontier and with the “rankness and protestantism in speech” accompanying the growth of nationalism after the War of 1812. Half...
I want her to show up in Thor.
Rán. In Norse mythology, the Robber, wife of Ægir; goddess of the stormy sea and the drowned, who dragged down ships with her hands. At one time Scandinavian sailors made human sacrifice to Rán before embarking on a long voyage. To drown was to go to Rán, and it was well to carry gold on a sea voyage to appease her, should you go to dwell in her halls. Although she was known as cruel and...
Side-effects of qat chewing.
The reaction to it is insomnia, followed by severe headache, loss of semen through urine, and reduction of sexual vitality.
Makes qat-chewing sound really enticing, doesn’t it?
Phallic foods.
In Rome phallic foods were especially popular, as noted by Lacroix (History of Prostitution I:234-35):
‘The alicariae, or bakers, were women of the street who waited for fortune at the doors of bakeries, especially those which sold certain cakes, made of fine flour, without salt or leaven, and destined for offerings to Venus. The popularity of these phallic breads and cakes in the ancient...
thelonliestmonk asked: I love your entries about Aztec culture. Could you suggest a good book to start reading about the Aztecs? Their history, culture and religion. Thanks!
The role of Aztec women.
A woman’s most important role was that of mother. In giving birth, a woman achieved the recognition and respect of the warrior. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún recounts the festivities surrounding a woman giving birth. When a woman delivered a child, her family members gathered around her and praised her strength in enduring fatigue and pain in the arduous separation of the “jeweled...
Ob, ab, and the Witch of Endor.
Ob (plural oboth). In ancient Hebrew belief and practice, a necromancer or necromancer’s familiar spirit (thus translated in the Authorized Version of the Bible): also, the object in which the spirit was thought to reside. The Witch of Endor (I Sam. xxviii) was baalat ob, possessor of an ob. This expression is, in the Septuagint, made to equal ventriloquist, one who makes his voice come...
Merf. Thinking is Hard.: Dear White Feminists →
jaded16india:
This letter is specifically directed to several white feminists — self-identified as such — who wrote to me in OUTRAGE! that I shouldn’t have suggested a non-English term for “genderqueer” because then I’m doing teh reverse-racist and it’s just plain rude. This is my answer:
…
But don’t you know that God spoke English? The Bible’s written in it! (The English...
Russian Jewish wideboys of the 18th century.
From Daniel Panzac’s “International and Domestic Maritime Trade in the Ottoman Empire during the 18th Century,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, v24n2, May 1992:
…brokers, always of local origin, were essential mediators between the European merchants, on the one hand, and the buyers and suppliers, on the other. They spoke Turkish or Arabic, perhaps both,...
Thomas Burke, on trying to make a living from...
From Burke’s memoirs:
Jack London, with whom I had some correspondence, sent me a warning from California. Morley Roberts warned me. They used the words ‘precarious,’ ‘edge of a precipice,’ ‘bitter struggle,’ ‘nerve-wracking,’ in relation to the literary life as a sole source of income.
Yeah, he about nailed it.
Maxim Gorky, on the United States:
There will be no revolution here soon, not unless it comes crashing down on the thick heads of the local millionaires in ten years or so. Oh, what an interesting country! What these devils accomplish, how they work, how filled they are with energy, ignorance, smugness, and barbarity! I am enraptured and I curse; I feel sick and cheerful - it’s devilishly...
Virginity.
The reports of virgin goddesses who produced numerous children on Mt. Olympus and elsewhere has been a cause of considerable confusion. The reason for the confusion is the ambiguity, linguistic as well as ethnographic of the term “virginity.” Whereas in modern Euro-American cultures the term virgin refers, except in Catholic theory, to a female with unruptured hymen, in other...
On economics and helping the poor.
Thomas Carlyle, in Past and Present (1843):
One of Dr. Allison’s Scotch facts struck us much. A poor Irish Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of Edinburgh, went forth with her three children, bare of all resource, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of that City. At this Charitable Establishment and then at that she was refused; referred from one to the other,...
Vatak, Autak, or Udai.
In Zoroastrian belief, a female demon who forces men to speak when they should not and disturbs them while they are performing their physical functions; a fiend of incest, half human, half monster, who is said to be the mother of Azhi Dahaka in Pahlavi texts.
Timothy Stapleton's No Insignificant Part, about... →
Tea and books and stupid crap: I have a theory... →
emilytheslayer:
I have a theory about Twilight, and how it was almost an incredibly amazing work of genius. BEAR WITH ME.
What if Bella were an unreliable narrator? BOOM the entire series would have been incredible. I don’t think this is the way it’s meant to be read at all, but think how cool it would have been…
Dental microevolution and migrations to the...
Again from Mann’s 1491, this time talking about when and how the Americas were first inhabited:
…Christy G. Turner II, a physical anthropologist at Arizona State, supported the three-migrations scheme with dental evidence. All humans have the same number and type of teeth, but their characteristics—incisor shape, canine size, molar root number, the presence or absence of...
The Olmec.
More from Mann’s 1491, about the Olmec (“Nobody knows the right name for the Olmec, but “Olmec” is the wrong one”):
Scattered around the San Lorenzo platform were stone monuments: massive thrones for living kings, huge stone heads for dead ones. Rulers helped to mediate between supernatural forces in the air above and the watery place below where souls went after...
File this under "Papers I'll Never Write."
Which is a mental category I (like most other writers) have for ideas which intrigue me and could potentially be fruitful, but which I will never have the time to write. (Or put together for a presentation at ICFA).
From the North-China Herald, 18 November 1916, in which the author is describing the debut of the tank during World War One:
The land-ship—it heaves and rolls like a...
Anonymous asked: Could you give me the reference for the Maya post?
Pre-Columbian Terraforming.
The Yucatán Peninsula is like a gigantic limestone wharf projecting into the Caribbean. Roughly speaking, the northwest-southeast line on which it joins the mainland runs through the middle of the Maya heartland. Despite receiving three to five feet of precipitation in an average year, this area is prone to drought. Almost all of the rain falls during the May-to-December rainy season and rapidly...
Tiwanaku, the third-largest city in the world
in 1000 A.D.
Not heard of it? It was on the shores of Lake Titicaca. “Less a centralized state than a clutch of municipalities under the common religio-cultural sway of the center,” Tiwanaku (founded around 800 B.C.E.)
took advantage of the extreme ecological differences among the Pacific coast, the rugged mountains, and the altiplano (the high plains) to create a dense...
Another story setting, free of charge.
Of the Indian city of Mandu in the late 15th century, John Keay writes:
“Mandu consequently basked in the splendours of lavish patronage. According to Ferishta, Mahmud’s successor was able to assemble a harem of ten thousand maidens. To accomodate them, a self-contained ‘city of women’ was constituted whose inmates formed their own administration and militia, ran their own...
Well, this sort of thing interests me, anyhow.
And who knows when this information might come in handy?
Nineteenth-century accounts shed light on how the castration procedure was undertaken in China where total castration was the norm and the “eunuch-maker” was a special occupation. In preparation for surgery, the patient’s abdomen and upper thighs were tightly bound with strings or bandages that left the penis and scrotum...
Someone needs to use this.
In a game or in fiction, somewhere:
In the much later Tibetan tradition, a special class of lamas (gter-ston, “treasure finders”) went about “discovering” scriptural treasures (gter-ma) that had allegedly been hidden away long before, during the Buddha’s lifetime, to await the foreordained moment of their revelation.
I can’t be the only one who sees the...
The demon fighter "woman-blue."
The Demon-Statutes of Nü-ch’ing appears to have come into existence before the end of the fourth century. The work’s title sets it clearly within the rigorously-legalistic Taoist worldview. As for the enigmatic component nü-ch’ing, its literal meaning is “woman-blue,” but it should probably be read as standing for the closely related compound, nü-ching...
Three Trans Women in Honduras Murdered in Three... →
dancingonembers:
Take Action Now
Sign the IGLHRC letter to Honduran officials demanding justice!
*trigger warning for image and description of graphic transmisogynistic violence at link*
if you reblog anything from me, reblog this post.
The soliloquy of Molly Bloom Wooster
….I love clubs I’d love to have the whole bally place swimming in Drones God of Oxbridge theres nothing like nature the wild Thames you know then the sea and the whatsit waves all rushing about like Aunt Agatha after a recalciyouknow nephew then the beautiful country with fields of thingummy and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to...
Combat feng shui.
Banners with the elements and emblems of the quarters were used in the deployment of armies, each section placed appropriately on the ground according to its banner as recently as the nineteenth century.
[footnote leading to]
For the armies of the Nien rebellion and the Pa Kua society, see Chiang, The Nien Rebellion, pp. 27-29. Sun Tzu… Ch. IX - on marches, advises keeping on the Yang...
Indian pulp/noir.
The Indian newsweekly Tehelka just put out a pulp/noir fiction issue. All stories free online, with great accompanying art.
If you are at all interested in pulp/noir fiction, you owe it to yourself to read the stories. India has a tradition of mystery fiction that is almost as old as England’s, and has boasted some fantastic writers who are completely unknown in the West. The authors of...
Hmm.
“….asocial black magic provides a graduated scale by which the latent aggressivity of a society may be measured….”
Morrison Versus Moore: My Opinion.
As is usually the case, Murray Kempton said it best:
A while back I fell into one of those tiresome discussions where the other party says you take Julius Erving and I’ll take Larry Bird and you take Sarah Vaughan and I’ll take Ella Fitzgerald. There was no disposing of such nonsense except to observe that the years have taught me to be grateful for having them all.