I learned in a Latin Studies class (with a chill white dude professor) that when the Europeans first saw Aztec cities they were stunned by the grid. The Aztecs had city planning and that there was no rational lay out to European cities at the time. No organization.
When the Spanish first arrived in Tenochtitlan (now downtown mexico city) they thought they were dreaming. They had arrived from incredibly unsanitary medieval Europe to a city five times the size of that century’s london with a working sewage system, artificial “floating gardens” (chinampas), a grid system, and aqueducts providing fresh water. Which wasn’t even for drinking! Water from the aqueducts was used for washing and bathing- they preferred using nearby mountain springs for drinking. Hygiene was a huge part if their culture, most people bathed twice a day while the king bathed at least four times a day.
Located on an island in the middle of a lake, they used advanced causeways to allow access to the mainland that could be cut off to let canoes through or to defend the city. The Spanish saw their buildings and towers and thought they were rising out of the water. The city was one of the most advanced societies at the time.
Anyone who thinks that Native Americans were the savages instead of the filthy, disease ridden colonizers who appeared on their land is a damn fool.
Makes me happy to see people learn about the culture of my country 😀
Also, please remember that the idea of a nomadic or semi-nomadic culture being “less intelligent”, “less civilized” (and please unpack that word) was invented by people who wanted to make a graph where they were on the top.
Societies that functioned without 1) staying exclusively in one location or 2) having to make complicated, difficult-to-construct tools to go about their daily lives… were not somehow less valid than others.
the fact women are viewed as being more sexy at 15 than 40 is the creepiest thing in the world
Horrifying really
Looking through the notes, and people seem to be justifying this as evolutionary biology. They believe that human females are most fertile at the age of 15. Considering your body isn’t even done growing at this age, I find this incredibly hard to believe. Really? The best time for you to push a baby out of your vagina is when your periods probably aren’t even regular yet? Like the younger you are, the more likely you are to DIE from child birth. Well anyway, most websites claim you’re most fertile in your 20s, peaking at 27… So congrats on trying to blatantly justify pedophilia by using bullshit science.
Not only is “15 year olds are more fertile” a creepy, pedophilic belief, it’s also an extremely dangerous one.
Also, don’t believe the whole “most girls got married at 13-15″ bullshit. Most medieval records (pre-1500s) and more recent records show that this is pretty rare in a lot of societies. Most women actually married around 17-21, and others could be “married” young but not actually considered a woman to leave for her husband until around this age. IE, a family might “marry” their infant to another, usually within a few years age of the infant, but they would not live together until they were adults. This was often to show kinship between families, usually for political purposes, and could later be ‘broken’ before anyone went to live in another’s house.
Now is your excuse really going to be “BUT PEOPLE IN 1450 … rarely… DID IT TOOOO!” when you’re talking about people who didn’t wipe their asses, believe in bathing for the most part, rarely got to wash their clothes, or have basic access to sewage systems of any kind? Are you really gonna uphold the tenets of a society that really thought it was okay to shit in a fancy jar and throw it out the window when the jar got full? because… dude, there’s a reason the Japanese wanted to kick out Euro foreigners, and it wasn’t just xenophobia. We were freaking gross. We spread disease because we didn’t WASH THINGS. To the point where anti-Semetic beliefs spread because Jewish people kept their kitchens clean and stuff, so they didn’t DIE as often from basic shit like food poisoning and hepatits A (common in shellfish then). Was the solution to learn something and wash stuff? NO. Instead it was “Jews must be magical and are killing off proper Christians!”
Anyways. the point here is. What you think history might have been like is probably nowhere near as fucked up as you think it was, and if you think that’s a cool attitude to bring back, you’re prob more fucked up than 1400s Europe. So.
There.
Those are things you now know. Whether you wanted to or not.
(In Italy, the average age for marriage was 17; in France it is 16yo; and in England and Germany 18yo was the average age – all for first marriages. Source: “Medieval Households” by David Herlihy, Harvard University Press, 1985)
AND JUST SO YOU KNOW THOSE AVERAGE MARRIAGE AGES GOT HIGHER AS THE YEARS WENT ON. AND WOMEN MARRIED MEN THEIR OWN AGE.
“The World We Have Lost" by Peter Laslett details a thousand marriage certificates issued in Canterbury from 1619 to 1660. ~85% of English brides in this period were at least 19 years of age when they married. The average ages at marriage for women were ~22 years, for men ~24 years.
Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.
On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.
In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.
In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.
Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.
Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.
“Ludwig van Beethoven was of African descent, and the truth of his ethnic origins was covered up through a mixture of white powder worn on his face when out in public, the use of body doubles for portraits, and “euro-centric” historians, hiding the truth of his genetic heritage.“ – src
I’m mad that we aren’t taught this
This doesn’t get any truer, no matter how often it crosses my dashboard.
People like Elon Musk are frightening to me, not because they have wealth or influence, but because they have a completely rabid personality cult dedicated not to Elon Musk the human – but to that eccentric nerd underdog millionaire that people believe he represents.
His cult does not look at him as an actual person – but as an archetype. They want to see him live out some Tony Stark esque lifestyle, even though the man himself has done virtually nothing of scientific note. A real-life superhero for nerds who are desperate to live vicariously through him.
On a related note – Nikola Tesla died in poverty partially because he had worked on providing early solar, and hydroelectric energy to the masses . Attempting to usurp his scientific legacy through establishing a corporation which panders to the wealthy is a cultural crime and I refuse to believe Elon has the slightest shred of respect for the man as he was.
wupacing 