💾 Archived View for nytpu.com › gemlog › 2024-08-20 captured on 2024-08-25 at 07:33:56. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I wrote the top part of this post and then got sidetracked writing the entire bottom part, but I didn't want to throw out all of it out so I just left it in despite it being essentially unrelated XD. It can be safely ignored.
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What I find to be the most interesting parts of history is learning how “normal people” actually lived at a given place and time; but unfortunately it seems to be emphasized very little by historians, and especially popular history and even history classes that aren't hyper-specific graduate-level.
It's far more interesting to me than whoever the monarchs of the time were, how much they expanded their territory, or just looking at old buildings and statues with no context—and the vast majority of those surviving structures would naturally be the grand temples, monuments, and government buildings that were made of stone rather than the average person's dwelling of wood, mud/clay brick, etc.
I have a theory that most people on some level actually find it the most interesting part of history too, which is why stuff like the Ea-nāṣir tablet[1] became such a big meme: it's so relatable to experiences we have now and reminds us that people have always fundamentally been people; ancient people aren't some utterly alien group that're completely impossible to relate to. They aren't all nomadic tribal groups with customs completely unrelated to ours, and they especially aren't just mindless peons doing nothing but obeying some emperor's delusions of world domination.
I guess in general I just find mundane facts about how commonplace stuff works interesting, whether it's a historical fact or modern. e.g. like half of Technology Connections' videos on household appliances. Mundane stuff that very few people at the time or now would care about or find interesting.
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For instance, I realized that most bread prior to cultured yeast (c. 1850s) had to have been sourdough (barring cultures that *exclusively* ate unleavened bread, which is rarer than one would think). But it turns out that many cultures where wine or especially beer was the primary alcohol (which is a whole 'nother topic) made leavened bread using some derivative of the fermenting alcohol as a yeast source, producing a very different kind of bread.
I also like hearing about how in classical Greece and ancient Rome, there were fans of chariot racing precisely like modern sports fans. They've found people's rooms decorated with banners for their favorite team, clothes they would've worn matching their team's, and there's some evidence that there was even hooliganism like modern soccer. (and I don't even like sports myself, I just love the parallels to modern times).
Or did you know the reason that one can't eat pork in most Abrahamic (and other religions originating in the Middle East) is most likely just encoding preexisting local values of the time? Because unlike in, say, Europe, which has lots of forests and areas generally suited for someone to bring their pigs into to forage, most of the Middle Eastern areas where the Abrahamic religions originated do not have many areas suitable for pigs to forage. So if one was keeping pigs, one would have to at least partially feed them grain that otherwise would've went to feeding humans directly, which would naturally be a major faux pas, particularly in communities that had limited arable land in the first place. In addition, since pigs are omnivores, they would eat dead carrion and random garbage, which would make eating them unclean and possibly unsafe if that makes up a larger portion of their diet—i.e. if they mostly have to forage in inhabited areas with refuse around and/or nonforested areas without much plant matter to eat.
Very pragmatic lines of reasoning, so of course one's community would want to culturally encode it in their customs and practices as a “universal” rule, to help discourage that dickhead from growing/buying a bunch of grain only to turn around and feed it to their pigs. It just so happens that those local customs and practices became the basis of what would turn into the group of largest religions in the world (and notably banning pork is one of the rules less likely to be adopted into local variants or by less-devout members).
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