The Great Wall is perhaps the most iconic piece of Chinese architecture and the best known outside of China. It is also widely misunderstood. Border walls like the Great Wall in China, Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, and the Great Wall of Gorgan in Persia do not function the same way as the walls of a city or fortress. These walls are less about keeping people out than they are about managing, observing, and sending a message to the people entering the country or already within it.
Woot! We made it! Hidden Youth has gotten funded! Thank you so much to everyone who contributed, spread the word, or expressed support over the past few weeks. I am so thrilled to be part of this anthology.
And now, as promised, I give you: The Top Five Greek and Latin Poems that Read Like Teenage Facebook Updates
5. #CRUSHINGSOHARDYOUCANTEVEN (Sappho, frag. 31)
He’s lucky as the gods,
any man who sits by you,
listening close to your
sweet voice
and lovely laugh. It just
makes my heart tremble in my chest.
When I glance at you, words
won’t come,
my tongue shatters, a thin
flame runs under my skin,
I can’t see,
my ears ring.
Sweat pours, I break out
trembling, I’m paler than a
flower. I could almost die.
But I can take it all…
4. #THATONEGUY (Horace, Satires 1.3.1-3)
The trouble with all these musical types is when you’re out with friends
and you beg them to sing, nothing will open their lips,
but when you don’t want them to sing they won’t shut up.
3. #DTMFA (Catullus, Poems 85)
I hate and I love. Maybe you wonder why I do this?
I don’t know, but I feel it happening and it’s torture.
2. #YOLO (Archilochus. Elegies frag. 232.8)
Aisimides, no one who listens to other people’s
criticisms ever gets to have a good time.
1. #BESTFRENEMIES (Martial, Epigrams 1.32)
I don’t like you, Sabidius, and I don’t know why.
All I know is: I don’t like you.
Announcements from your hosts.
There are just five days to go in the Kickstarter for Hidden Youth, the anthology of speculative fiction about marginalized young people in history. As I posted before, my story, “How I Saved Athens from the Stone Monsters,” is one of the stories in this awesome collection. I wanted to post again to thank everyone who has contributed to making Hidden Youth happen and also to say something about why this collection is so important to me, and would be even if I didn’t have a story in it.
I teach ancient Mediterranean history at a state university. Ancient Mediterranean history is the dead-white-guy-est of all dead-white-guy history. It’s filled with the sorts of dead white guys that people make white marble statues of and that living white guys like to point to as the pinnacles of western literary, artistic, and philosophical achievement. We’ve basically had two thousand years of white guys burnishing their white-guy cred by laying exclusive claim to the legacy of the great dead white guys of the ancient Mediterranean. So successfully have they done this that a lot of people have a hard time imagining an ancient Mediterranean world that isn’t all white guys.
Now, I’m a white guy. I’ve always had the comfort of seeing myself in history. Even as a professional historian, doing my best to be objective and fully conscious of how complicated, contingent, and constructed such identities are, I can never really know what it is like to look at history and not see people who look like me. That’s a barrier I can’t cross, but I have a lot of friends who live on the other side, especially my students.
Half my students are women and a lot of them are black, Hispanic, and southeast Asian kids from working-class towns. They’ve lived their lives in the shadow of other people’s histories. They have been shown the dead-white-guy-marble-statue version of history and told—sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly—“This is ours. You don’t belong here.” I consider it my job to say: “Yes, you do. You were always part of this history.”
The ancient Mediterranean world was multicultural, multi-ethnic, multilingual, and full of connections both within itself and to the larger world beyond. Like in my story, there were Egyptians in late classical Athens with their own Isis temple. A Sri Lankan king sent ambassadors to open diplomatic relations with Rome. And it wasn’t all a bunch of men, either. The queen of Halicarnassus was a military adviser to the Persian king. A wealthy woman of African ancestry was buried in style in late Roman York. The evidence is everywhere once you start to look for it.
The power of dead-white-guy-marble-statue history is strong and it needs to be challenged. I confront it in the classroom and my scholarly work, but we also need books like Hidden Youth out there to send the message: history is for everyone, not just people who look like me.
If you’ve already supported Hidden Youth, thank you so much. If you haven’t, please consider it. You can give as little as a dollar, and if you can’t do that, please spread the word.
On a less serious note, let me offer an added incentive to give: if Hidden Youth meets its funding goal, in honor of the collection’s theme I promise to translate and post my picks for The Top Five Greek and Latin Poems that Read Like Teenage Facebook Updates.
UPDATE: Hidden Youth got funded! Hooray! So, as promised, here you go: The Top Five Greek and Latin Poems that Read Like Teenage Facebook Updates.
Images: Bull leaping fresco (restored), photograph by Nikater, via Wikimedia (Knossos; 1550-1450 BCE; fresco). Janifrom kantharos, via People of Color in European Art History (Etruria, currently Villa Giulia; 6th c. BCE; ceramic)
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Besides being an awesome name for a band, paleolithic Siberian unicorn is an apt description of an animal otherwise known as Elasmotherium.
Elasmotherium was a prehistoric relative of the rhinoceros that ranged across central Asia and eastern Europe. It stood over 2 meters tall at the shoulder and its body was as long as 4.5 meters. Its distinguishing feature was an enormous horn on its face. The exact size and shape of the horn have never been determined, since no horn remains have been found, but the bony basis for the horn can be clearly seen on preserved skulls.
Elasmotherium was long thought to have gone extinct over 350,000 years ago, but recent work on a skull found in Kazakhstan has shown that the animal survived until at least 29,000 years ago. That puts living Elasmotheria in the middle of the upper (more recent) paleolithic (40,000-10,000 years ago). Humans certainly lived alongside them and may have depicted them in cave art.
Some have speculated that Elasmotheria survived even longer and may have been the inspiration for fantastical animals including unicorns, as described by eastern European legends, and the Chinese qilin. It’s impossible to verify such ideas, but they’re fun to think about.
Image: Elasmotherium via Wikimedia (c. 1920; painting; by Heinrich Harder)
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
When characters in fantasy fiction sit down to a meal, we have a pretty god idea of what to expect. If the setting is Europe-ish, you can count on hearty bowls of stew, roasted meats dripping with savory juices, ripe wheels of cheese, and maybe a little bread to dab up the sauce with. If the setting is Asia-ish, expect sizzling pans of vegetables and fish, skewers of meat steaming with spices both hot and sweet, and maybe a little rice to dab up the sauce with. (And I’m sure some of you out there who have read books I haven’t can tell us what food to expect in Africa-ish, Americas-ish, or other-ish settings.) The trouble with this picture of food is, historically speaking, it’s backwards. The sizzling meats, steaming vegetables, and spicy sauces are not the food. The bread, rice, and other grains are the food.
If you’re inventing a fantasy religion for a story or game, you’ll probably want more than just buildings and rituals. Who uses those buildings? Who performs those rituals? Not just the everyday believers but the people whose job it is to carry out the functions of the faith. For many of the stories we tell that involve imagined religions, knowing something about the people who have expertise in that religion is important.
There are many different kinds of religious experts, even within most religious traditions, and their roles and lives can vary enormously, from the highest priest of a central temple to the attendant who sweeps the dirt off a rural roadside shrine. Some cultures have complex hierarchies of religious people or divide them into many different roles, while in others all people who follow a religious life are the same. Some religious traditions have no special personnel at all.
To try to list all the possible variations of religious people would be overwhelming and unhelpful. Instead, I’d like to offer a way of thinking about different kinds of religious experts that is flexible and practical, especially for worldbuilding. To that end, consider this question: what is it about a person with a special religious role that makes them special? Here are a few possible answers, and bear in mind that more than one of these can apply to the same person.
Special powers
Some religious experts are believed by the adherents of their faith to be endowed with a special ability to invoke divine aid, at least under certain conditions. Historically, it is common to refer to religious experts with such special powers as priests, but different traditions have their own terms.
A familiar example in the modern west is the priests of Catholic Christianity who have the power to, among other things, invoke the miracle of transubstantiation. Many other religions practiced today also have priests who perform important rites, such as Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Shinto, and Ifa. The priests of most historical religions with an organized structure also fall into this category, including those of ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, Persia, the Aztecs and the Maya. Many traditions require specific circumstances, locations, and rituals in order for the invocation of divine aid to be effective, but others hold that every act of a holy individual is imbued with divine force.
Life is tough as a flute girl working the streets of Athens—and that’s before the monsters attacked. When the city’s guardian statues suddenly come to life and start rampaging through the city, Mnestra, an Egyptian girl, and her Thracian friend Lampedo get separated in the chaos. Can Mnestra find the courage to rescue her friend and confront not only the monsters tearing up the city but also the most powerful man in Athens?
My short story “How I Saved Athens from the Stone Monsters” will be published this fall in the anthology Hidden Youth, a collection of 22 short fantasy and science fiction stories about young people from marginalized groups throughout history. This anthology follows the previous collection Long Hidden which told the stories of people who are often left out of speculative fiction.
I am honored to have my work chosen for Hidden Youth, but this anthology needs our help to make it out into the world. Check out the Kickstarter for Hidden Youth and consider supporting this work.
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Here’s a look at how we made yesterday’s Dinner with Durin’s Folk.
The menu
The idea for this month’s dinner is a meal that doesn’t actually happen in Tolkien’s text. We were trying to imagine what sort of a dinner the Fellowship might have enjoyed if they had arrived at Moria and found a thriving Dwarven colony there instead of a fallen kingdom. Not only is there no particular meal in the text for us to use for reference, in fact it is a bit of a puzzle to work out what proper Dwarven food would actually be like. Gimli doesn’t have much of an opportunity in The Lord of the Rings to serve up food of his own. There’s plenty of Dwarves and plenty of food in The Hobbit, but it’s mostly the Dwarves eating food prepared by other people—Hobbits, Elves, Beorn, etc.—or making do with what they can find in the wild. We don’t get much of a sense of what Dwarves cook for a nice dinner at home or offer to guests.
So, a little speculation is called for. We can start with the fact that Moria is underground. Thorin recounts to Bilbo that the Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain traded with the Men of Dale for food rather than growing their own. (H1) We know that the Dwarves of Moria traded with the Elves of Hollin long ago, so Balin and company would probably have traded for food from the world outside as well. (2.4) Since the lands west of the Misty Mountains were quite desolate, most of the Dwarves’ trade would have been with people to the east, especially with the Beornings whose baking Gimli praises. (2.8) In those days of wolves and war, keeping the trade routes open for fresh food would have been difficult. The Dwarves of Moria would have mostly had to make do with food that would keep for a long time.
These are the ideas that inform our menu: ingredients that keep (salted and smoked meats, roasted nuts, dried lentils) and things they could have gotten in trade from the Beornings or other peoples east of the mountains (honey, bread, and flour).
Land tenure. The very words sound boring. Perhaps they conjure images of gray-haired men in tweed jackets with elbow patches picnicking beside a barley field. But stick with me for a minute here, because land tenure is an important thing to know about in understanding historical cultures and for building your own fictional worlds.
Land tenure is one of several terms historians use to describe the legal structures surrounding the control of land. (Technically, the term land tenure is only used in British common law. Other legal systems use different terms, but this is one you’ll see a lot of in English-language history texts.) The question of who controls a piece of land is always important, but it is especially vital in agrarian societies in which land, specifically farmland, is the basis of wealth. Land tenure is about figuring out who gets to use a piece of land and under what conditions.
In some cultures this isn’t an issue. Some legal systems allow only an either-or choice, you either own a piece of land or you don’t. Under other traditions, no one owns land at all. But in certain kinds of societies, the question of who controls a plot of land and under what conditions they hold it is at the heart of many conflicts.
It’s the same basic principle that applies today when you rent an apartment. As a tenant, you have certain rights in the use and enjoyment of the apartment, but the landlord also has rights they can enforce such as demanding rent and keeping the apartment in a usable condition. Landlords have good reason to want to keep as much control over their property as they can. They don’t want tenants messing things up and making it harder to rent the apartment profitably in the future, plus they want to be able to easily get rid of tenants who make trouble or don’t pay their rent. At the same time, renters also have good reason to want as much control as possible over their apartments. They want the security of knowing they won’t suddenly be thrown out and have to look for a new place and they want to know that no one’s going to be coming in and messing with their stuff. There is a tug-of-war between different interests and the balance of legal rights between landlords and tenants reflects the balance of power in larger society.
Random thoughts in no particular order. Spoilers ahead.
Responses to Erik’s thoughts and additional randomness by Eppu
Other thoughts:
Image: Detail of still from X-Men: Apocalypse via IMDb
In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.
Co-Geeking 
