#history musings

[lturnips]

there's something really poetic about Alexander the Great conquering the Persian empire and deliberately burning Persepolis (the symbol of Persian kingship) to the ground, trying to erase the empire only for it to actually preserve loads of clay tablets which are some of the only sources that can tell us about daily Persian life that aren't biased sources from the conquering Greeks. something about perseverance no matter how hard you try stamp down the resistance...

[die-rosastrasse]

Émilie Lévy & Louis Français

Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 24 VIII 2023

[st-just]

I kind of love the fact that classical Athens a) very much didn't want anything like a king, but b) still very much followed a religion where a sacral kingship was an absolutely necessary intermediary between populace and divine.

So their solution was to have an elected office of archon basileus, an entirely politically powerless position whose role was 'be king specifically and only for the purposes of religious ritual, sacrifice, and augury'.

Underrated worldbuilding concept tbh.

[learnelle]

affectionate details have my whole heart

[lionofchaeronea]

Rooftops in the Snow (Snow Effect), Gustave Caillebotte, 1878

[sheltiechicago]

The nine muses of Ancient Greece discovered in the ancient Greek city of Zeugma, now in modern-day Turkey. The mosaics have been almost perfectly preserved for over 2,000 years

[armthearmour]

A pair of elaborate puffed and slashed Arm Harnesses, Germany, ca. 1520, housed at the Musée de l'Armée.

[berrybanana-arts]

“I’ve got my eye on you, Sixer.”

A little bit of menacing Bill and troubled Ford for Forduary! :)))

Edited the pencil drawing to fix some features, add detail and highlights, and push the contrast a little.

The unedited version! :))

Goofy thumbnail:

[life-imitates-art-far-more]

Thomas Couture (1815-1879) "The Romans in their Decadence" (1847) Oil on canvas Located in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

[verum-artifex]

🤍 Dynamic Duo. 🖤

[katy-l-wood]

This is tangential to the whole KateGate situation, but one person I saw talking about it mentioned how the royal family has been getting away with altering images for CENTURIES to make themselves look better, and they're just shocked they're finally getting called out for it.

But that made me curious. DID they get called on it before? Like, in Henry VIII's court were there people gossiping about how much better the portrait artist made him look after he started to really go downhill? Were there newspaper articles in the Victorian era about the fact that Victoria had images of herself altered all the time?

[st-just]

Is there a pithy one-word term for the chauvinism of literate/urban/agrarian elites toward nomadic pastoralists and hunter-gatherers? Like as far as bigotries go it's pretty much literally as old as civilization (that is, since those elites have existed to record/feel their chauvinism), but I can't think of a specific term for it.

[learnelle]

affectionate paintings

[lionofchaeronea]

The Dance, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1856

[notfye]

the secret history is a book where the plans made it out of the group chat

[excerptum]

In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person's soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.

Donna Tartt, Chatelaine Interview (2013)