Ancient Peoples

It was requested by several people to be made reblogable and we have made it so.

ancientpeoples:

Herodotus

Herodotus is often referred to as the “father of History” in so far as he seems to be one of the first “historic” writers. However I would be inclined to called him the “grandfather of History”…or maybe the “slighty mad uncle in the corner at parties of History”. Some of the accounts, or stories, in his “Histories” are particularly fanciful. This has led to his other nickname “The father of Lies”. This is unfair. Herodotus’ work literally means “Inquires”, they are him exploring the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars (along the way covering other subjects like geography, anthropology, ethnology, zoology, fables and folklore) where he inquires and reports back all he has heard. Things are worth reporting primarily if they are interesting, not just if they are true or not.

His focus is on the achievements of mankind, not of the gods and heroes like epic poetry, and of great and marvellous deeds (by all peoples and even in nature like the Nile inundation.) He attempts to build a full a picture as possible, using these of the build up to the War and then the War itself.

I want to share some of the brilliant and strange stories which turn up in Herodotus’ work. They are testament to the fantastic imagination of mankind.

All these examples come from Book II (the Egyptian logoi). I’ll probably do some more examples another time.

On the Nile (2.19-27)

He gives to following reasons for the Nile flood:

1. Winds- North winds blow, preventing adequate flow to the sea. (Herodotus argues that this incorrect because it floods even if the winds fail and the winds have no effect on other rivers)

2. It flows from the great Ocean that encircles the world (a more legendary explanation apparently)

3. It’s caused by melting snow (this is apparently just as worthless a theory as the others because the countries the Nile comes from are hotter than Egypt)

4. Displaced water from other rivers because the sun changes his path in different seasons (H’s own theory, I love ancient Greek logic)

On the Egyptians being weird (2.35-8)

1. The women go to market and men stay at home and weave. Women even urinated standing up and men sitting down.

2. They knead bread dough with their feet and clay with their hands and even handle dung (the horror!)

3. They are religious to excess, and make a point of washing cups and clothes (how dare they!), they even circumcise themselves to be clean rather than comely (I love my translation)

On the Hippotamus (2.71)

1. It has 4 legs, cloven hoofs like an ox, a horse’s mane and tail, conspicuous tusks, a voice like a horse’s neigh, and is the size of a very large ox (I am really not sure if he ever saw a hippo from that…)

On the Phoenix (2.73)

1. Visits every 500 years when its parent bird dies. Its gold and red and shaped exactly like an eagle.

2. One story says it carries a lump of myrrh to make into a kind of egg coffin for its dad and then buries it in the temple of the sun (Herodotus doesn’t find this credible surprisingly)

On flying Snakes (2.75-6)

1. Opposite Buto there are loads of skeletons of flying snakes piled up in a mountain pass. The snakes try to migrate into Egypt from Arabia but the ibis greet them at this pass and kill all of them.

2. They have wings like a bat.

Blind Pheros

1. Pheros was a King of Egypt who went blind. He had got angry at the river for flooding too high and thrown a spear at it. (which of course made him blind…)

2. After 10 years the oracle at Buto said he’d served his punishment and would be cured if he washed his eyes out with the urine of a woman who had never slept with any man except her husband. So he tried his wife’s urine…didn’t work (awkward), then many many many other women…eventually one worked and he could see again (huzah!).

3. All those women whose urine failed were collected together and burned. He then married the lady whose pee worked (I wonder what ever happened to her husband…)

The Clever Thief

1. Once there was a very rich king who put all his silver in an elaborate treasury. The builder eventually died, but on his death bed he told his 2 sons about a secret door. The brothers used it and eventually the king noticed. He hid some traps inside the treasury. Next robbery one brother got caught in the trap. He begged his brother to chop off his head so that the king wouldn’t recognise him and the brother could carry on as normal. So the brother did and the king found a headless corpse in the trap.

2. The king hung the body up and had it guarded trying to spot the thief should he come and mourn. The thief’s mum was angry and wanted the body of her son to bury. She nagged the remaining brother. He got the guards very very drunk and stole the body, he even shaved the right cheek of each of the guards.

3. King was very angry. So he order his daughter to join the local brothel and ask every man who came to her what was the cleverest and wickedest thing they had ever done in the hopes of catching the thief. So eventually the thief arrives. But he has heard about the king’s plan and so cuts off the arm of his corpse and goes to see the princess.

4. He tells her about cutting off his brother’s head (wickedest thing) and getting the guards drunk (cleverest thing). She quickly grabs him and calls her father, but she grabs the corpses arm and the thief escapes.

5. The king is impressed. He sends out a message that the thief is forgiven as he is clearly the cleverest man ever. Thief appears and marries the prostituted princess. (Yay for happy endings.)

Cheops and his Pyramid

1. He closed all the temples and made all his people slaves. He made them build his pyramid.

2. He ran of money so made his daughter a prostitute. She charged each punter one stone. These were made into the middle pyramid at Giza.

Well there we go for now, I hope you have enjoyed reading a few of these. The ancient writers tell some really amazing stories and hopefully I’ll get round to writing a few more of these. Like the one-eyed men chasing griffins, or the gold digging ants of India, or the queen who went too far and chopped off the breast of all the women in a town and hung them up on the walls as their husbands were slowly impaled beneath them… but its ok the queen ends up being eaten by worms.

ancientpeoples:

The poetry of ancient Sumer

In the history of the world, poetry is a constant. Predating the invention of writing, humans have conveyed their stories in a way to make it attractive for the receiver. Once script had been invented, oral traditions continued to be expressed in a much more tangible way. We can still see remnants of this formerly oral custom in the usage of repetition in early poetry and prose. In time, this reiteration of phrases and words fell into misuse, because the medium no longer required it. Despite the changing winds of fashion, poetry has always retained its one purpose throughout all these millennia: to touch the heartstrings.

The earliest examples of literary verse are found in the Sumerian corpus of texts, nine generations – give or take a few – after the emergence of writing. Before this, manuscripts were limited to administrative notes and writing exercises such as lexical lists and vocabularies. Unlike our present-day society, where each artist makes sure to sign his or her work on the off chance he or she will be granted a fleeting moment of fame, Sumerian poetry and literature has mostly come to us by the hand of anonymous composers – barring the exceptions that confirm the rule. The oldest known name in the corpus is that of Enkheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad.

Detail of a Sumerian tablet

Inanna and Gilgamesh

By far the two most well-known pieces of Sumerian literature are Inanna’s journey to the underworld and the epic of Gilgameš. The replication of parts of sentences, words or ideas is the characteristic feature in both these works. There are different ways the composers made use of this style attribute, and one of them is parallelism. The opening lines of Inanna’s journey portray this style very well:

“From the great heaven she set her mind on the great below. From the great heaven the goddess set her mind on the great below. From the great heaven Inanna set her mind on the great below. My mistress abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, and descended to the underworld. Inanna abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, and descended to the underworld.”

In Inanna’s admonishing her minister Ninšubur to make sure she does whatever she can to get the other Gods to help Inanna return from the realm of the dead do we see this parallelism again, as we do in the description of the Goddess’ attire. By far the most elaborate use of reiteration is the part where Inanna, after having passed through each of the seven gates of the netherworld (shedding a piece of clothing every time until she is left naked) and sitting down on her sister Ereškigala’s throne, faces the judges of the underworld.

“They looked at her — it was the look of death. They spoke to her — it was the speech of anger. They shouted at her — it was the shout of heavy guilt.”

Then, later on in the story, Inanna has the distinct pleasure of turning the judges’ behaviour on them. It’s a classic form of parallelism not only in the passage itself, but in the storyline as well. And, on an even larger scale, entire plot vehicles can be recurring features in Sumerian poetry: Gilgameš, accompanied by his friend Enkidu, also makes a trip to the netherworld, where the living really have no business going.

Gilgameš

A beautiful poetic line we find in the first paragraph of this story:

“At that time, there was a single tree, a single ḫalub tree, a single tree, growing on the bank of the pure Euphrates, being watered by the Euphrates.”

As in Inanna’s tale, it’s this repetition that gives the Sumerian style such a distinctive aftertaste. In a different story, recounting Gilgameš’s battle with the giant Huwawa, there is another characteristic usage of reiteration: chiastic repetition.

“The king set out from the city; from Kulaba Gilgameš went.”

This type of repetition can be compared to a ABBA rhyming scheme, only the final BA are variants of the first AB. It can occur in a single sentence; an entire paragraph, or even in a complete work of literature. It’s subtle and can be used to create tension in a tale. We know the king sets out from the city; but which king, and what city? This is then made clear to us immediately after, but suffice to say that the composer could’ve led us on for as long as he or she wanted to.

It’s because of this cyclical, rhythmic nature that the Sumerian literary style is so distinctive and a pleasure to read. A poet or novelist these days would have immediately been written off as amateurish for being ‘tedious’, ‘monotonous’ or even ‘dull’, despite properly executed reiterations can be gripping. In the end, poetry is and will always be a matter of taste, but the Sumerians, even in their first tentative steps in the genre, have succeeded in embodying – perhaps even creating – the very nature of it. 

ancientpeoples:

Treatment methods for oral and dental ailments in Ancient Egypt

Like us, the ancient Egyptians weren’t spared from oral ailments. Their diet, which was full of fibre and coarse, often uncooked, vegetables, in combination with a dental hygiene that possibly wasn’t up to our standards, caused various diseases such as attrition, caries and periodontitis. But the Egyptians were inventive, and not unversed in medical practices: they had devised many treatments for the various affections that bothered them, both chirurgical and medicinal in nature.

Molars suffering from attrition

Common diseases

Attrition was by far the most common affection in ancient Egypt. Caused by the coarse diet (which may also have lacked necessary minerals and vitamins) and the presence of sand, husks, and sometimes even straw, in their bread, many Egyptians suffered from this condition. The skulls and jaws found in burial shafts and tombs almost all show attrition to some degree. This may not sound like a very serious disease, but attrition, when left unchecked, can be a stepping stone to much more severe issues. It can lead to abscesses, inflammation of the gums and jawbone, and tooth loss.

Despite a diet free of refined sugar, caries was still fairly well represented amongst Egypt’s pearly whites. Interestingly enough, this disease seemed to have been much more common among the elite than it was among lower classes. This may be attributed to the higher sugar content in the diet of higher class Egyptians.

Other conditions, most of them attested in medical papyri such as papyrus Ebers, were dental abscesses (“purulency in the gums”), receding gums (“a tooth which gnaws against an opening in the flesh”), loose teeth, ulcerative stomatitis (“eating ulcer on the gums”), periodontitis (“blood-eating”), alveolar diseases, dental sepsis and calculus.

Lower jaw with traces of a periodontal abscess (the small hole in the bone)

Cures, treatments and dentists

So what did the ancient Egyptians do about this? Dental conditions aren’t to be taken lightly: they can very well prove lethal if they remain untreated. There’s some discussion on whether or not the profession of dentist existed in Pharaonic Egypt, mostly because of the seeming lack of actual surgery to cure these affections. To some extent, physicians in Egypt relied on spells and other magic for their treatments, but medicinal therapy was just as big a part of this. The papyri Ebers, Hearst and Berlin give us quite some recipes which could very well have made a difference by alleviating the pain or even inhibiting inflammation. If we define the term dentist as one who knows and attempts to cure diseases of the mouth, then there certainly have been dentists in Pharaonic times.

The papyrus Ebers has eleven recipes which pertain to oral issues. Four of these are remedies for loose teeth: the tooth in question is either ‘packed’ or ‘filled’ (the translation and therefore our interpretation is a little ambiguous) with a mixture that is akin to a modern day composite filling: a filler agent (ground barley) is mixed with a liquid matrix (honey) and an antiseptic agent (yellow ochre). This is either used as an actual filling, or as a splint to keep the tooth in place.

Egyptians also had various mouthwashes and mixtures that had to be chewed and then spit out, meant to combat gum disease. Some of these have more active ingredients than the others, and they certainly seem to have at least provided the patient with some manner of pain relief. These recipes have ingredients such as sweet beer, creeping cinquefoil, bran and celery in different compositions. Some of the mouthwashes were for the specific purpose of maintaining a healthy mouth and teeth.

But not everything is purely medicinal in Egyptian medicine. The Edwin Smith surgical papyrus gives us treatments that are, as the title suggests, much more surgical in nature. One case handles the dislocation of a jaw, and the treatment for this hasn’t changed in over five thousand years. Some of the discovered jaws and skulls have evidence of additional treatment next to the application of medicine. It’s not altogether impossible that Egyptian dentists knew how to drain an abscess, or cut away cankered gums.

Pharaonic physicians were no strangers to reconstruction works: there have been three instances of a dental bridge: one or more lost teeth reattached by means of a gold or silver wire to the surrounding teeth. However, it’s a bit unclear whether these works were performed during the life of the patient or after death – to tidy them up, as it were, before their burial.

All in all, the ancient Egyptians were very attached to their pearly whites, and took great care to treat the diseases they knew as best as they could. They were skilled in medicine and surgery, relying on actual treatment just as much, or perhaps even more, as they did on magic spells and prayers to the Gods.

Hesy-re, “Head of Dentists” - A Third Dynasty physician

Female Head with rosette diadem

Ivory (Height 3.5 cm)

Neo-Assyrian (c.8th-7th Century BC)

Found in Iraq

Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art