YES. This whole thread is the best thing and betterbemeta’s tags (above) are on point. I would love actual ‘realistic ancient battles’ where like ten actual fighters and whatever serfs they can persuade to accompany them posture and try to intimidate each other, or have an Official Scrum on a mutually beneficial day. That and just…cattle raiding.
I guess in post-collapse terms it’s theoretically different because your whole raider gang exists to nick other people’s shit so doesn’t need to cultivate or craft much except perhaps to make them more self-sufficient in weaponry, armaments, and other logistical things that’ll enable them to raid harder and more often. That’s exactly why, on the other side of things, as many citizen’s as possible in your vulnerable good-guy farming commune might need to be militia members to protect themselves from people who can dedicate their full-time everyday energy to Being Raiders.
I say in theory because, even if you’re nicking other people’s shit, why not treat that as a bonus? Why not look to history’s peoples who placed a particular import on raiding as a way of life, and notice that none of them were just straight-up predators. They had enough agricultural or pastoral or pescatoral (is that a word?) infrastructure to subsist, and then the luxury, the surplus, came from attacking other people part-time, very occasionally. Look at norse folks going viking; look at the invasive pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe. Just in terms of the caloric requirements and risks inherent in combat, you’re not gonna want to do that full-time. Training to do it well will take more calories and they need to come from somewhere. You pick your battles. You take without fighting at all where you can – so intimidation and making enemies surrender without having to fight is important here; c.f. pirates of the Golden Age – and you fight rarely and only when you know you can a) win, b) benefit hugely from it.
THANK YOU
i think this post has changed my world. literally.
the ‘death is cheap’ approach to warfare only really came on the scene in the 19th century, and not full-blown until WW1. the american civil war and similar conflicts, with mass charges against cannon and the like, that’s a very modern approach to warfare and it assumes manpower is your cheapest resource.
in a non-industrialized setting, manpower is your most EXPENSIVE resource. you don’t throw masses of bodies against a position unless you’re an idiot, except in very rare cases – say, xerxes vs the 300 – where numbers are your only advantage and you don’t have any other options.
in pre-industrial warfare, tactics could make a shockingly outsized difference. there are many documented cases of a few commandos or a surprise flanking move defeating an army ten, twenty times their size. well-trained, well-equipped soldiers are not expendable in that setting. they are your best hope of winning. a medieval warlord would no more throw away his knights, archers, sappers, or other trained troops on massed action than a modern general would throw away her heavy bombers on a strafing run. that’s not how you use those.
just as the modern general uses long-range missiles for bombardment before sending in rare and expensive things like helicopter gunships for close engagement, the medieval warlord used mobile cavalry to isolate and harrass the enemy, and archers to soften them up, before picking his moment and ground to strike with heavy cavalry.
as ellis points out, these trained and equipped troops need a lot of support. reducing the enemy’s support was an essential tactic. when fantasy writers have a siege happen, they tend to think it’s just about starving the other guy or breaking down the wall. but the besieged army often ran into trouble long before that. running out of arrows was a problem, for instance, and when you eat your horses you no longer have a cavalry. a lot of times, that heroic ‘sally forth’ business that broke a siege one way or the other was just because it was eat the horses or use them, and a knight on foot was no longer able to fulfil his tactical role, so the leader rolled the dice rather than have his knights downgraded to footsoldiers.
one result of the need for civilian support for these troops was that you really, really didn’t want to slaughter the peasants if you could help it – at least not if you were taking over the territory, or thought you might want to at some point. it’s not like you could just ship a hundred thousand political prisoners from moscow to work the farms. the peasants WERE the land. without them, it was just a lot of mud you had to get across. you couldn’t stay, you couldn’t use it.
so i’d advise a moratorium on medieval armies burning every farm they pass, and slaughtering the inhabitants of cities they occupy. a few particularly ruthless warlords in history did that a few times, to make a point, and it was shocking back then, or it wouldn’t have worked. alaric sacked rome as revenge, not a takeover bid; you wouldn’t do that to a city you wanted to keep.
in response to the crisis going on in chechnya right now, i wanted to underline how important it is to understand the complexity of russian homophobia, which has proven to be distinct from many western strains of homophobia due to historical circumstances. historically, same-sex attraction has been seen as non-russian due to its connection to bourgeois decadence of the west (which opposed proletarian values), as well as long-term invisibility of the LGBT+ community under stalin and its sudden reemergence in the 90s (when the soviet union collapsed) which shapes much of contemporary homophobia. there are also other factors, such as promotion of hypermasculinity within the soviet union after WWII and the generally sexphobic culture prevalent under the regime. while biological arguments (”it’s unnatural”) and religion have also played a role in modern russian homophobia, it is the association of LGBT+ existence with the west that has causes the most retaliation against LGBT+ activism. (we can see this most evidently with sochi olympics and now with the chechnya crisis; external activist efforts are rejected because ‘the west is trying to meddle with russian politics/values’ and internal efforts are rejected because ‘they’re brainwashed by the west’)
since i just finished my massive research paper on russian lgbt+ history, here are a few sources that i would highly recommend for learning more about how russia came to be so homophobic:
DAN HEALEY (aka the champion of russian LGBT+ history):
Book: Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent– excellent and meticulously detailed overview of the complexities of russian LGBT+ lives at the beginning of the 20th century; discusses both progressiveness of lenin’s regime and the violent repression and erasure of LGBT+ identity under stalin, as well as so much more
Journal: HOMOSEXUAL EXISTENCE AND EXISTING SOCIALISM: New Light on the Repression of Male Homosexuality in Stalin’s Russia; a more brief overview than the book; may be more easily accessible. strongly recommend if you’re interested in history and want a starting point for learning about early soviet politics and how they affected LGBT+ lives
BRIAN BAER:
Book: Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity; excellent examination in the role that invisibility of the LGBT+ community (due to stalin’s repression and sudden reappearance in the 80s and 90s after gorbachev’s reforms) has played in making russians believe that same-sex attraction is a product of western infiltration into russian society. offers excellent criticisms of discourse surrounding russian LGBT+ issues by western scholars.
DAVID TULLER:
Book: Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia; offers a more accessible insight into russian LGBT+ society through recounting the author’s travels. over all a good book, but is not as far reaching or deeply analytical as some of the other sources. there’s a preview on google books, so you can easily skim through it.
MULTIPLE AUTHORS:
Book: Out of the Blue: Russia’s Hidden Gay Literature; An Anthology (ed. Kevin Moss); a wonderful read revealing numerous hidden gay/LGBT+ figures throughout russian literary scene. you’ll be surprised to find how many of the famous russian authors and poets were not straight.
Book: Gender in Russian History and Culture (ed. Edmondson); features a chapter by my man Healey discussing lesbianism and the medical/endocrinological discoveries of the 1910s-1920s that shaped russian discourse on homosexuality later on, as well as many interesting discussions about womanhood in russian and early soviet society.
if you went to discuss anything with me or have any questions about russian LGBT+ history, homophobia, or things about my personal experience as a same-gender attracted russian & ukrainian woman, my inbox/IM is available (just keep in mind that this is a highly sensitive subject for me and there may be some things i’m not comfortable disclosing)
Yes, i have a question. Why is the west always to blame for everything in the eyes of non-western countries? And why is homosexuality associated with the west in non-western countries?
Ok I cannot speak for yelyzaveta’s situation but since you are talking about non-western countries in general:
1. It’s not true everyone in non-western countries blames the west for everything. There is plenty of acknowledgement that the problems we face are complex and that inasmuch as we were affected by Western imperialism, we too had agency and it is not as simple.
2. HOWEVER, that rhetoric has at times been weaponised by certain politicians who wish to appeal to the notion that being LGBT+ is inherently foreign and alien, against our ‘traditional culture’ and therefore justifiably rejected. This is what I have encountered as an East & SEAsian. This is of course not true; same gender relationships are well-documented in Chinese history even as far back as the Han dynasty, for example. But it is a cheap and easy rhetoric to use in countries that either had a) a prior experience of Western imperialism/colonialism b) are in some ways seeing themselves opposed to some concept of ‘the West.’ The reason for this opposition differs depending on the country of course, but some sense of opposing Western-ness in general can feed this mentality. Unfortunately, as I’ve seen in my own family, a number of people fall for it.
3. One common reason they see it as emanating from ‘Western’ culture because for example, if I compare UK and Malaysia, the UK is a lot more progressive on LGBT+ rights today. These things are associated with Western-ness. The fact that many major human rights organisations that criticise these abuses are headquartered in Western countries feeds their claim that it is ‘cultural imperialism’ (as a side note, this is why it is extremely important to give visibility and awareness to the many non-western human rights and LGBT+ activists from those very countries). This, I must emphasise, is not only erasure of history but exceedingly ironic, and not only because LGBT+ people have existed in our societies throughout history. Because the UK in the past used to treat same gender attraction as either criminal or a mental illness. It has changed today because of the efforts of activists. But many of our countries that used to be part of the British Empire actually still have the homophobic colonial-era laws enacted by colonial governments in the books. Like section 377. Our societies were not necessarily utopian or totally accepting of LGBT+ people before that, but those British colonial laws are in fact used to oppress people today and did play a role in institutionalising homophobia as it exists in the present day. But that colonial origin is often conveniently forgotten by people who claim LGBT+ rights are ‘western’, and instead we get a reductive idea that LGBT+ rights is a ‘Western’ idea because of the modern situation.
I will underscore that the exact nuances of this narrative that ‘LGBT+ rights = foreign Western idea that should be rejected’ also takes on different nuances and contours, depending on the society in question.
The fact that this woman continues to have professional success is proof that there is no justice in the universe.
Trotting all this out again in light of her newest plagarism bullshit :))) It’s shit like this that keeps me ALIVE and living.
omg, sometimes I go a long time between re-reading and I somehow FORGET the dept of the batshit WTAF of the Msscribe sockpuppet saga, like HOW DO I FORGET, it is INCREDIBLE
Oh my god THERE’S NEW CASSIE CLARE PLAGIARISM SHIT GOING DOWN? SOMEBODY LINK ME
Ancient Egypt was repeatedly attacked by
a mysterious army of massive warships.
The raiders suddenly showed up around
1250 BCE and continued attacking until
they were defeated by Ramesses III. No
record of them exists past 1178 BCE,
and scholars continue to debate theories
about where they went, where they came
from, and who they were- so everyone
just calls them the Sea Peoples. SourceSource 2Source 3
*puts on historian hat*
Okay but this fails to mention the fact that this was part of an enormous phenomenon called the Bronze Age Collapse, which affected basically every civilization in the region.
It’s not just that Ancient Egypt got attacked by unknown people who we refer to currently as the Sea Peoples. It’s that some sort of mysterious Bad Stuff involving unspecified raiders was going down everywhere. Egypt fragmented under the pressure, while the Mycenaean kingdoms and the Hittite empire collapsed entirely. Cities all up and down Asia Minor were destroyed completely. Think of it as an early equivalent to the fall of the Roman Empire: a collapse so monumental that it left an actual dark age in its wake.
The aspect of this collapse that laypeople are most familiar with is probably the destruction of Troy.
Okay, history rant over.
*puts on tiny snake-of-history hat*
Not all historians think the Bronze Age Collapse was as simple as “The Sea Peoples did it” however, particularly these days.
Here are Two videos of two talks by the same guy (Eric Cline) discussing the event and its larger context. He’s pretty funny in a Dad-Joke sort of way :p He’s not the only scholar who thinks this, obvsl, but he’s written a fairly successful lay-audience book on the subject, and he does a good job of summarizing the alternate arguments.
we, in a manner akin to that of a man who once was, in Rome, an orator of significant skill, who was then for his elegance of speech renowned and now for his elaborate structure of sentences cursed by generations of scholars of Latin, the language which he spoke and we now study, Cicero, write, rather than by any efficiency, functionality, or ease of legibility have our words, our honors, the breaths of our hearts, be besmirched.
‘All that you need to know about boars can be summed up in the fact that if you wish to hunt them, you must have a specially made boar spear. This spear has a crosspiece on it to prevent the boar from charging the length of the spear, driving it all the way through his own body, to savage the human holding the other end.’
–Boar and Apples, T. Kingfisher
fuck OFF
Note that pigs are also HUGE. So, yes, they ARE slightly larger pigs.
So I grew up in the city and have never seen a pig in real life and I just googled it and WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS
I thought they were like labrador sized, like, fat labradors, not mini-cows.
every time I see this post there are more people discovering how fuck off huge pigs actually are and I love it I thought this was a thing everyone knew but clearly not and I’m laughing
This is me with our Tamworth boar, a heritage breed closer to their wild cousins than the Yorkshire above. I am a fully grown, average sized human. He was a gentle sweetie who, sadly, is no longer with us. His name was Mr. Big.
FUCK OFF
Forever laffin’ at people who don’t understand how enormous, terrifying, and tenacious wild boar are.
They’re like if bears had knives protruding from their closed mouths and Didn’t Know When To Quit. Their survival instincts when they’re wounded aren’t “run away and minimize injury” it’s “take the thing that hurt you down with you” They also make sounds like someone crossed a pig with an alligator.
Their head and neck alone can be like the size of an entire human torso.
Also forever laffin’ at people who think pigs are tiny, ‘cause we designed those things can get in the neighbourhood of a thousand pounds in ideal circumstances.
It’s like when people assume Tuna must be small because they’ve only ever experienced them in hockey puck form.
ooh ooh ooh! this is one of my favorite stories! i was driving home from an evening out, and a tree had fallen across the road into the valley, so i turned back and took a right i shouldn’t have. i soon found myself on a narrow, twisting road up the side of the mountain; pitch-dark, no turnings or other roads. of course it was beautiful, the air was cool and smelt like night-blooming cereus and ginger, the overhanging trees formed long, vine-looped tunnels. occasionally i’d pass the driveway entry for one of the big houses people build up there for the view. few and far between. suddenly my headlights picked up eyeshine (i remember it as red) like, creepily far above the ground. as i got closer, my headlights revealed a wild boar, about four feet at the shoulder, busily knocking over garbage bins left outside someone’s gate.
He wasn’t as flagrantly bad as Trump, but let’s not completely rehabilitate George W. Bush into a nice old man who likes to paint and can’t handle his raincoat, okay?
-signed, someone over thirty
dubya looks cutesy-pie now, but plz know he was the trump prequel, an utter buffoon and public embarrassment who lost the popular vote and stoked the ugliest brand of patriotism to bring us to a war with no purpose but personal and crony profit. he was a trump test run and worked magnificently
plz also know he is test running how we are expected to treat trump in retirement, as a delightful buffoon who wasn’t responsible
he is absolutely a buffoon
but he also created a war of no purpose (thus opening the way for future presidents to declare war personally, needing no congressional approval or oversight)
make fun of him because he is evil and deserves mockery, not because he’s just an adorbs old man who seems cutely befuddled
And don’t forget how he let a shit ton of Black people die or lose everything when Hurricane Katrina happened
That global gag rule that Trump just signed in? Yeah, W reinstated it after Clinton scrapped it, and killed thousands of women worldwide because of ir.
Tried to pass a constitutional amendment to “protect marriage” from same sex couples.
I was a senior in college for the 2000 election clusterfuck. That was a corrupt election. Everybody knew it. It was the first time I saw and heard suspicion that our democracy was inevitably failing.
W treated 9/11 as an opportunity to continue his daddy’s failed project of gaining a foothold in the middle east for the purpose of controlling oil exports. Note that after 9/11 the US went to war in Afghanistan, yes, and went after the Taliban, but W’s legacy was the war in IRAQ and the absolute catastrophe that created afterSaddam Hussein was killed (cue: power vacuum because the cowboy – though an evil shit cowboy – had left town. In roll more radical groups). Ppl older than 30 might remember the theatrics of the UNSC presentation in 2003 where Colin Powell held up a little clear vial of OMG WHITE POWDER as evidence that Iraq had enormous stockpiles of WMDs (that bullshit was fake, and Powell later regretted that he made the case to the UNSC that turned out to be wrong about WMDs in Iraq. Powell insisted that the whole cabinet had no idea they were so gravely mistaken over the presence of WMDs. Riiiiiight.)
Also W’s legacy: the Patriot Act, passed a month or so after 9/11. It legalized gross violations of citizens’ privacy and included shit like allowing the FBI free rein to search phone and electronic and financial records, and allows federal agents to search and seize if they had any suspicion of terroristic activities or connections to such. It also allowed for the indefinite detention of any non-citizen suspected of terrorism or anyone who seemed like they might commit terrorism IN THE FUTURE. We are going to see this again. I repeat: WE ARE GOING TO SEE THIS AGAIN. Suspension of basic civil liberties has already happened in the US and for good reasons, the Trump admin will say. There’s precedent now for that shit.
Also W’s legacy: instantiating and legalizing systematic TORTURE as a practice in interrogating prisoners. Think “alt-right” is an evil euphemism for Nazis? My generation actually got used to the term created by the GWB admin – “enhanced interrogation techniques” – to the point that honestly? It was easy to pretend it just. Wasn’t. Fucking. Happening. And it wasn’t – not on US soil. Because the W admin also decided to torture detainees at black sites overseas in countries where torture was legal (black sites that Trump has already moved to reopen). Detainees were – and will continue to be – beaten, starved, waterboarded, subjected to electric shock, sexually assaulted, et al. W backed away from treaties with the Hague international criminal court that could have tried these fucks for war crimes. OH AND DON’Tforget that time that W signed off on an act that allowed the US to INVADE THE GODDAMN HAGUE if ANY American citizens ended up there on trial for said crimes. He made us non-accountable for war crimes. I repeat: he made us non-accountable for war crimes.
The team of W, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and Rice? Evil. Mother. Fuckers.
Also never forget that time that a massive hurricane rolled in from the Gulf of Mexico and wrecked New Orleans and surrounding areas to the point that ppl were huddled on the roofs of their houses while actual bodies floated by in the Katrina floodwater. FEMA wasted a fuck ton of time and money and oversaw the essential displacement of a massive number of poor black residents of New Orleans who never recovered.
Hurricane Katrina wrecked thousands of lives on August 29, 2005. What was W doing that day? EATING BIRTHDAY CAKE WITH JOHN “I LOOK LIKE A GOOD REPUB NOW COMPARED TO ALL THESE NAZIS” MCCAIN. The photo was on the WH web page and other photos were time-stamped to show that these assholes were laughing and making silly faces over birthday cake AFTER they were already briefed on the Katrina devastation.
There would be no Donald Trump if there hadn’t been a W. W was not a dumbass, he was not a goofy, befuddled bumbler. He was smart in that pedestrian kind of way where he knew exactly when and how to play dumb, to roll out that Texas accent and plaster that revolting “I feel the pain and fear all of you are feeling, I’m sad too” wrinkle-browed look on his face. Most people fell for it. I know there were times – especially in my early 20s – that I did. He manipulated people into fear and complacency by faking empathy and humility and meanwhile developing and signing off on some really truly evil legislation.
The almost manic euphoria that swept so much of the US when Obama was elected? Part of it was relief: W, the monster of the west, was gone and we knew he wasn’t going to replaced by another version of himself in McCain.
Call me melodramatic if you want but honestly NONE of the terrifying stuff that’s happening right now could ever have happened were it not for the path cut (slashed, burned, bulldozed) by George W. Bush.
Stop romanticizing this fuckhead!!!!
Also it bothers me when people want to blame Cheney for everything, like W was just a puppet with no clue what was happening who just wanted to play golf.
He was COMPLICIT, he KNEW, it was his JOB to know, he is CULPABLE for everything. No free passes, he was president, it’s all his responsibility.
Ding ding ding. don’t do this to trump either, in the far future, if we’re still alive.
Watching this (and fearing broken ankles with each loop) I can’t helping thinking about that old quote Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels.
But no, if you watch closely you’ll see she doesn’t even step on the last chair. That means she had to trust that fucker to lift her gently to the ground while he was spinning down onto that chair. That takes major guts. I’d be pissing myself and fearing a broken neck if I were in her place. Kudos to her.
Okay so this is true, but a tiny part of a wider truth.
Ginger Rogers was a FUCKING BADASS. Ignore for a sec the rampant sexism in Hollywood (they once bleached her hair blonde in wardrobe without telling her beforehand), the fact that she fought her whole career against typecasting and stereotyping from fellow actors (Katharine Hepburn famously said of the Astaire/Rogers partnership “she gave him sex. He gave her class” ) for starting out in musicals, and went on to have a career lasting over fifty years, winning a Best Actress Oscar (Kitty Foyle, 1940). But… JUST focusing on the Astaire movies…
Not only did she dance “backwards” in high heels, the dances were a task in themselves. Astaire was an absolute perfectionist and choreographed for himself, so as a younger, less experienced dancer Rogers came in at a disadvantage and worked her ass off to match him.
Then there’s the filming complications… these numbers were filmed in ONE TAKE. So one thing goes wrong and you have to start over. Maybe you make a mistake or maybe your dress flies up because…
Ginger had to contend with her wardrobe. Dancing in heels is the norm at this time, but dancing in a dress designed for cinema cameras… not so much. They were heavy, embellished, uncomfortable, restrictive and cumbersome and essentially a third member of the dance, strapped to the body of one partner.Not only did she have to dance and look good, she had to control the dress too!
Take this routine from Swing Time… (it gets going proper at 1:30ish)
This dress has weights, YES WEIGHTS, sewn in to the hem to make it fly out and create a visual effect. So it’s heavy, it hurts if it hits you, and your partner gets mad if it hits him. So you gotta control it.
Well it turns out all these factors on this set, this particular day aren’t going so well. So you’re doing take after take, here’s no labour laws, so at 4am after 18 hours you’re still going, even though part of the routine requires you to spin up those curved stairs with no rail at high speed….
Okay so now back to those high heels. In Ginger’s autobiography she vividly remembers this night as the night she bled though her shoes. They did so many takes, her feet blistered, bled, and the white satin high heels she was wearing finished he night pink because they were literally full of blood. And still they keep shooting. She keeps dancing.
The take they use in the film is the last. Early hours. Bloody feet. And she spins, acts and bosses out until that last second. Because she was that professional, talented and bloody minded. This is the last set of spins…
So I say once again. Ginger Rogers was a badass.
She did everything Fred Astaire did backwards, in high heels, wearing a 20 pound dress, exhausted, injured and standing in a pool of her own blood. And watching her perform, you would never know.
YES, so i recently wrote a paper about jewish pirates and merchants for a thesis and used a shit ton of archive information and secondary sources (which are detailed below).
As we know, Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. Some remained behind, known as conversos, who managed to hide their Judaism and remain behind. Others went into Calvinist Holland, but a majority of them went to Brazil, which was Portuguese-owned. The Jews there were known as marranos (pigs), but they were the first group to begin harvesting and collecting sugar by themselves. The marranos grew to have nearly 200 sugar plantations that they worked themselves— they traded with the Dutch, primarily. Sugar was hella expensive and Spain was hella jealous.Once the Iberian peninsula split (~1640s), Spain came in and took the land for themselves, either massacring or otherwise coercing the Jews to give up their Jewishness. They were kind of out of options, because Holland was engaged in war with Portugal and England was still not super friendly to the Jews, so they moved to the Caribbean.
Jews had been on Jamaica since about 1510, though they called themselves Portugals. They managed to get together a plea for England to get into Jamaica before Spain took it over, so Cromwell sent the English.
During the time in-between, Jews (Moses Cohen being the most famous Jewish pirate) roamed the seas with other “Brethren of the Coast”s. Because the Iberian diaspora had sent them all across the Old and New World, they had vast intelligence networks. Jewish merchants in Jamaica knew when ships in Spain were leaving, what they were carrying, and where they were going. Jewish pirates took revenge on the Spanish and, unlike the English, release the slaves from their bonds and either kept them on or took them to Haiti.
Jews are the best don’t let anyone fucking tell you otherwise.
Regarding the Jewry, Hereby Expelled from Spain, 1492. trans. Aaron Marx, coll. Jacob Rader, The Jew in the Medieval World (Cincinatti: Hebrew Union College Text), 1999.
Amsterdam Jewry’s Successful Intercession for their Immigrants and Businessmen, January 1625, trans. Jacob Marcus, coll. The Jew in the Medieval World.
Blacker, Irwin. Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation, 1596-1600. Vol 3.
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1661-1668. (National Archives, Kew, Surrey, England), 7/24/1667.
Taylor, John. Taylor’s History of his Life and Travels in America and other parts, with An Account with the most remarkable Transactions which Annuaille happened in his daies (1688), trans. John Robertson.
Ockley, Simon. The History of the Present Jews throughout the World, 1791, coll. Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World.
Secondary Sources
Davis, David. Inhuman Bondage (Oxford University Press: New York), 2006.
Finkelstein, Norman. The Other 1492: Jewish Settlement in the New World, (iUniverse: Nebraska), 2000.
Glitz, David. The Religion of the Crypto-Jews, (UONMP: Albuquerque), 2002.
Holzgerg, Carol. Minorities and Power in a Black Society: The Jewish Community of Jamaica, (Lanham: North-South Publishing), 1987.
Kritzler, Edward. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, (Anchor Books: New York), 2008.
Selzer, Michael. Kike! A Documentary History of Anti-Semitism in America (Oxford University Press: New York), 1972.
Taylor, S.A.G. The Western Design: An Account of Cromwell’s Expedition to the Caribbean (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica and Jamaican Historical Society), 1969.
Tolkowsky, Samuel. They Took to the Sea, (London: Thomas Yoseloff), 1964.
Zahedieh, Nuala. The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and the Spanish Contraband Trade 1655-1692 (Leicester: Leicester University Press), 1978.
probably the constant reminders that throughout time and regardless of time, place, language, religion, ideology, system of governance or dominant school of thought, people remain fundamentally people
like i know that sounds really glib but it’s like – when i was doing this after alexander course last year, right, we looked at this thing called the zenon papyri, a huge stash of administrative documents from greek-ruled egypt addressed to an official called zenon, which was preserved because the winds changed and the building they were kept in was buried under a massive sand dune. and there’s one which we called the krotos papyri, which is a letter from a native egyptian writing to zenon telling him how he had been mistreated by greeks, who laugh at him because he doesn’t know how to “act like a greek” and call him a barbarian and refuse to pay him his proper wages. which is very familiar. and when you look at the actual papyrus fragment, the writing at the top is big and clear and spaced-out, but as it gets towards the bottom of the page it gets smaller and more cramped and the lines are all squint, because this nameless egyptian guy who does something with camels in the 250s BC hadn’t worked out how long his letter was going to be and he’s realised halfway through that he’s going to run out of space
and in first year i went on this trip to hadrian’s wall, and it started snowing while we were standing on it and the wind was blowing a gale right into our faces, and afterwards we heard a lecture about the vindolanda tablets, and there’s one, tablet 346, a letter to a soldier stationed there – and the soldiers stationed there could come from anywhere in the empire, rome or egypt or north africa, hot places, basically, and the wall is fucking cold – which is maybe from his wife or mother or sister, which reads as follows:
“… I have sent (?) you … pairs of socks from Sattua, two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants, two pairs of sandals … Greet …ndes, Elpis, Iu…, …enus, Tetricus and all your messmates with whom I pray that you live in the greatest good fortune.“
and that’s not some kind of “people don’t change” idea. people do change, have changed. you read the stuff these civilisations produced and some of it is so, so alien to us, so hard to understand, so strange. but then in amongst it you find things like people running out of space on their last bit of paper, or sending their son more socks because he’s got a job somewhere cold. and we remember it, these weird small human things, by total random chance! no-one sat down and thought ‘let’s keep this’ – the wind changes and an entire archive of papyri is preserved under a sand dune for 2000 years. the excavators who found the vindolanda tablets thought they were wood shavings. there’s a pot of roman face cream in the museum of london which still has fingerprints in the cream, which was found hidden in a ditch outside a temple. and in the meantime, we have no firsthand accounts of the campaigns of alexander, one of the most influential series of events in western history, because… we just don’t. they existed, but they’re lost. for some reason, somehow, presumably though some kind of enormous cosmic joke, we have a fragmentary letter from an anonymous person sent to an anonymous soldier telling him his pants are in the post and to say hello to his friends, but we don’t have callisthene’s deeds of alexander or ptolemy’s memoirs. isn’t that infuriating? isn’t that great?
just moving along like everyone else 