4 posts tagged “ancient”

lazy blogging=lots of linking=hours of your life lost

May 3, 2008
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I'm not sure why I never have anything to say anymore, on either of my blogs. I'm usually spewing some drivel or another so you might think it would end up here, but well, I have to chalk it up to laziness.

At least with a list like this it proves you can find pretty much anything you want on the Net. And that Stumbleupon rules. Here are a few of my favorites to keep you busy for hours.

And so, for your lazy link pleasure:

Candy by Joshua Hoffine

That should keep you busy for now. :)

ancient roman beauty remedies

Aug 26, 2007
1 comment

Ancient Roman Makeup

One of the best things about writing on the subject of ancient Rome is that I'm in a constant state of learning and research. Today, in learning a bit more about the Roman poet Ovid's life, I discovered that he wrote an early primer to helping women become more beautiful. I've read the Metamorphoses and Amores but was unfamiliar with his Medicamina Faciei Femineae or Women's Facial Cosmetics or sometimes seen as The Art of Beauty.
The fragment we have from this book (link above) is fascinating, offering up three and a half beauty tips for Roman women. The first is a lengthy and messy recipe on how to make your skin whiter. The second recipe on getting rid of pimples would, as we know now, kill you slowly over time. I imagine that many women paid such a high price to be beautiful:

Then make haste and bake pale lupins and windy beans. Of these take six pounds each and grind the whole in the mill. Add thereto white lead and the scum of ruddy nitre and Illyrian iris, which must be kneaded by young and sturdy arms. And when they are duly bruised, an ounce should be the proper weight. If you add the glutinous matter wherewith the Halcyon cements its nest, you will have a certain cure for spots and pimples. As for the dose, one ounce applied in two equal portions is what I prescribe. To bind the mixture and to make it easy of application, add some honey from the honeycombs of Attica.

That pesky lead. Unfortunately, it was a main additive to cosmetics for centuries. Romans used it in many things, including as a sweetener for wine, which is considered by some to be the cause of dementia that affected many Roman emperors.

There is also a recipe to get rid of blackheads and this little tidbit which is fragmented:

I have seen a woman pound up poppies soaked in cold water and rub her cheeks with them. . . .

Wonder what the poppies did? I also wonder why Ovid decided to concern himself so much with beauty concoctions that he would write a book for the ladies to use. Perhaps he was a little bit entrepreneurial?

oh that golden egg!

Apr 8, 2007
6 comments

I've previously talked about how I'm creating a master booklist that should keep me busy for many many years. I'm still

Aesop's Fables (Oxford World's Classics)

Aesop

working on it...mostly I need to add 20-21st century books at this point. I've published the list thus far and will continue to add to it and check off books as I read them. It's listed in a mostly chronological order, primarily by date of the author's death. The chronology isn't 100% accurate and that doesn't concern me too much. But if you see anything missing, let me know. Again, I'm still working on 20-21st century so there is a LOT missing from that era at this point but I think the prior eras are pretty full.

One of the books that I read was a collection of Aesop's Fables. It was a fairly easy read, as the fables are all one paragraph and they are often redundant. I was struck by how long it has been since I have read any of his fables...in today's world, usually they are taught to children. But in the ancient world, these were cautionary tales told by adults, for adults. It wasn't until the 1700s when the fables became popular for teaching children.

In this translation by Laura Gibbs, there are 596 fables. WOW. I had no idea there were so many. I mostly knew about The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Man With the Golden Eggs, the City Mouse & the Country Mouse, and I had some vague childhood memory of the Lion & the Mouse.

But did you know about The Beaver and His Testicles?

What I also found interesting is that they don't have any remaining texts of Aesop's fables. But the fables were so popular that they are many copies written and transcribed by various scholars from across the centuries, the earliest of which is Phaedrus in the 1st century and numerous copies in the Middle Ages, all of which you can check out for yourself at Aesopica, maintained by Laura Gibbs, translator of the book pictured here. Definitely check out her site and check out the very cool illustrated editions including this one from Francis Barlow depicting the fable, The Lion in Love.

The Lion in Love

I'm so glad I decided to embark upon this literary adventure. I've only read a 8-10 books on the list so far but I have learned so much--about ancient Greece and Egypt, about literature and how the literature has shaped the world and other stories that would be later written.

I'm reading the first few books of the Bible right now. It's been nearly 15 years or so--probably in college in my Old Testament class (I went to a Presbyterian liberal arts college). As a lover of words and literature I have a hard time reading the Bible in many ways, especially the early books. There are stories that contradict other stories, or just don't make any sense. One in particular that drove me crazy is how the youngest son of Noah, Ham, accidentally walked in on his father one day when he was drunk, naked and passed out. He went out of the tent and told his brothers, who walked in backwards so they would not look upon their father's nakedness and covered him with a blanket. When Noah discovered that Ham had viewed him naked, he cursed all his descendants (those of Canaan) to be slaves. I read that and said, WTF? Because dad got all boozy and passed out and his son accidentally walked in on him, all his ancestors were to be punished? There are dozens of other episodes of this nature that drive me equally crazy, but then I will end up arguing Biblical theory with people and I don't really have any desire to do so. I do have faith in a higher power but I just can't take the Bible at face value. There are just too many passages that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Like how Lot's daughters got him drunk and slept with him when he was passed out in order to father children (of whom came the Moabites and Ammonites). Huh? Nothing happened to them for their lewd behavior but all of Ham's descendents are cursed to be slaves? Okay, I'll shut up now. :-)

I'm sure there is an Aesop Fable that would be perfect for my endlessly running off at the mouth...

through the sevenfold gates

Mar 6, 2007
4 comments

I just finished the first book on the Great Books List that I decided to plow through as a new path to some form of

The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin Classics)

Anonymous

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literary enlightenment. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a poem that tells the story of a hero-king who is 2/3 God and 1/3 man (curious how that works, huh?) that ruled the ancient city of Uruk in approximately 2650 B.C.E. The poem as we understand it today comes from a variety of tablet sources found in excavations all over the ancient world. The tablets are often in pieces or indecipherable but enough copies exist that translators have been able to piece together the majority of the ancient poem.

The most famous tablets were discovered in 1850 and 1853 by British archaeologists who found the royal libraries of Ashurbanipal, king of Nineveh. But those tablets weren't the only copies of the poem. It was a story that had been widely copied and distributed throughout the years and it is because of its ancient popularity that so many tablets have been discovered and have given us the ability to recover so much of the lost text.

According to the book at the right (pg. xxvii (talk about lazy citations!)), translated by Andrew George:

The standard version of the Babylonian epic is known from a total of 73 manuscripts extant: the 35 that have survived from the libraries of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, 8 more tablets and fragments from the three other Assyrian cities (Ashur, Kalah and Huzirina), and 30 from Babylonia, especially the cities of Babylon and Uruk.

Several things stood out for me while I was reading:

The poetic repitition, clearly a mechanism for driving memory for what was intially a long-standing oral poem. The poem, if it were intact, would be nearly 3,000 lines long (but according to George approximately 575 are missing). But if you took the numerous repeating stanzas out I imagine the entire piece would be closer to perhaps 1500-1800 lines. I find that I liked the repetition--it gave me a sense of ritual and of connection that drew me into the narrative.
The use of the numbers seven, ten and thirteen in various ways throughout the poem. What struck me was how far back the significance of these numbers goes.
The flood/ark comparisons which many other people have made so I don't need to. But the fact that hundreds of ancient cultures have a flood story make me personally doubt the word-for-word Noah story.
This story takes place in what is now Iraq. Many of the tablets are/were housed at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, which has been subjected to looting during the war. The ancient Sumerian cities of Ur and Uruk are now located in what is currently a war zone. I find an incredible sadness about this...that so many of the world's oldest treasures have been or are being destroyed by senseless violence. 7,000 years of history gone in the blink of a suicide bomb or by air raids. These cities have importance in a variety of the world's religions, including Christianity. Ur is even thought to be the birthplace of Abraham. Sigh, it just makes my heart sick to know that we care more about blowing each other up than preserving world history.
In 2003, they think they found Gilgamesh's tomb, which sounds incredible...buried under the Euprhates.

Next on the list is the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which I have read in the past, but quite a long time ago, most likely when I was a little goth chick interested in spells or something. I picked up a used book from Powells but unfortunately, the copy that I have is from 1967 (and water-damaged...sometimes you get what you pay for, huh?). I am thinking I may look into a more up-to-date copy that incorporates findings/insight from the last 40 years.