Tag: Ancient History

When Did Taxation Begin?

You guys know how much I like history and will take any opportunity to bring it to the forefront.

I apologize this was suppose to be posted on 15 April, the day we file our taxes with the IRS.

We all bitch and moan about paying taxes but the idea of imposing taxes has a very early history…..for now we believe the idea of taxation began in Mesopotamia around 3300BC and has continued until today.

Taxes are a familiar part of modern life, showing up in paychecks, receipts and annual filings. Yet even in our digital era, traces of older systems persist. When archaeologists recently uncovered a 2,000-year-old pyramid-shaped structure in the Judean Desert—believed to be a Ptolemaic tax collector’s post—they weren’t just digging up the past. They were brushing dust off a blueprint of ancient governance.

“Most governments were quite highly motivated to extract as much revenue as possible within perceived political constraints,” says Taisu Zhang, a professor of law at Yale Law School.

What remains today, such as stone inscriptions, clay tablets and bamboo records, tells a story far beyond administration. These tax relics reveal how early states governed, what they valued and how they balanced power with the burden on taxpayers. From Sumer to China, civilizations devised ingenious, and sometimes bizarre, ways to track, collect and enforce taxes, leaving behind vivid clues of how they funded their ambitions—and proved that even in the Bronze Age, nothing was certain but death and taxes.

The clay tablets of ancient Sumer represent some of the earliest examples of economic record-keeping. In the city of Uruk, scribes used reed styluses to press proto-cuneiform symbols into wet clay, documenting grain, livestock and labor owed to temples. Each mark stood for a tangible asset—a bundle of wheat, a head of cattle or a day’s work. By around 2,600 B.C., in the city of Lagash, the system had grown more sophisticated, with some tablets recording instances of tax evasion and penalties for non-payment.

The Standard of Ur, a wooden box inlaid with lapis lazuli, shell and red limestone, offers a striking visual of early resource distribution. One side shows nobles at a feast; the other, soldiers and laborers—an implicit hierarchy supported by the upward flow of goods. Though not a literal tax record, the artifact reflects a redistributive economy likely sustained by tribute or taxation.

https://www.history.com/articles/tax-artifacts

Taxation is nothing new….while it can be a burden to those that are unfortunate to be taxed while others get a free ride (thinking the US wealthy)….they are a needed revenue for any government to continue to ‘serve’ the people they represent.

It would not be such a burden if EVERYONE paid their taxes but unfortunately there are some that do not and that is okay for some.

I hope you made the deadline for the IRS.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Who Invented The Wheel?

On a cold Sunday….lots of time for my mind to go in different directions looking for answers.

Could this be another of those probing questions I pose from time to time?

Once again my mind has tossed me a question that made my brain itch….and as usual I had to go about answering before my hair hurt.

The invention is common knowledge but is the inventor? Was it the caveman or the Sumerians or some extraterrestrial visitor that gifted humanity with this much used invention? I am sure there may be other ‘inventors’ that are considered.

Hundreds of thousands of years before the invention of the wheel, some unlucky hominin stepped on a loose rock or unstable log and—just before they cracked their skull—discovered that a round object reduces friction with the ground.

The inevitability of this moment of clarity explains the ancient ubiquity of rollers, which are simply logs put underneath heavy objects. The Egyptians and the Mesopotamians used them to build their pyramids and roll their heavy equipment, and the Polynesians to move the stone moai statues on Easter Island. But rollers aren’t terribly efficient, because they have to be replaced as they roll forward, and even if they’re pinned underneath, friction makes them horribly difficult to move. The solution—and the stroke of brilliance—was the axle. Yet despite the roller’s antiquity, it doesn’t appear that anyone, anywhere, discovered the wheel and axle until an ingenious potter approximately 6,000 years ago.

The oldest axle ever discovered is not on a wagon or cart, but instead on a potter’s wheel in Mesopotamia. These may seem like simple machines, but they’re the first evidence that anyone anywhere recognized the center of a spinning disk is stationary and used it to their mechanical advantage. It’s a completely ingenious observation and so novel that it’s unclear where the idea came from—perhaps from a bead spinning on string?—as it has no obvious corollary in nature. The pole is called an axle, and many scholars consider it the greatest mechanical insight in the history of humankind.

Yet there exists another great intellectual leap between the potter’s wheel and a set of wheels on a rolling object. The full wheel set appears to have first been invented by a mother or father potter, because the world’s oldest axles are made of clay, are about two inches long, and sit beneath rolling animal figurines.

The first wheeled vehicle, in other words, was a toy.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/who-invented-the-wheel-and-how-did-they-do-it

Best knowledge gives us the answer of the age old question….who invented the wheel?

Sorry still cannot put a name with the invention….it could have been Gronk or some guy named Bob….we may never know his/her name.

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AI Positivity

AI is the new trend here on the blogosphere….both pro and con….I have been mostly con because I am old and set in my ways. I have written about the dangers, as I see them, of depending on AI too heavily.

So when I recently read something that made me think of AI in a positive vain I felt I had to post it to be fair.

A group of researchers have made the translation of cuneiform possible….

Translation isn’t simply a matter of swapping one word for a corresponding word in another language. A high-quality translation requires the translator to understand how both languages string thoughts together and then use that knowledge to create a translation that maintains the linguistic nuances of the original, which native speakers effortlessly understand.

As difficult as that process is, it’s nothing compared to the challenge of translating an ancient language into a modern tongue. These translators must not only resurrect extinct languages from written sources but also have intimate knowledge of how the cultures that produced those sources evolved over centuries. If that weren’t enough, their sources are often fragmented, leaving crucial context lost to the ages.

Because of this, the number of people capable of translating languages from antiquity is small, and their best efforts are often outpaced by the volume of texts unearthed by archeologists. 

Take ancient Akkadian. This early Semitic language is one of the best attested from the ancient world. Hundreds of thousands, by some accounts more than a million, Akkadian texts have been discovered and today lie in museums and universities. Many have even been digitized online. Each one has the potential to teach us about the life, politics, and beliefs of the first civilizations, yet this knowledge remains locked behind the time and manpower necessary to translate them.

To help change that, a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists and computer scientists has developed an artificial intelligence that can translate Akkadian almost instantly and unlock the historic record preserved in these 5,000-year-old tablets.

https://bigthink.com/the-future/ai-translates-cuneiform/

I believe this could be a boon for the history records….there is so much we do not know about this period of humanity that we might learn more about what it is to be human.

If this works out I shall tip my hat to AI for providing a valuable service to mankind.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Women’s History–#2

If it is Friday then it must be time for some history.

We here on Word Press like to think of ourselves as authors….and some have succeeded in that endeavor….but do you know who the first named author was in history?

Yep another of my famous history lessons.

So with all that written….who was the first named author in history?

History’s first recorded author was a woman named Enheduanna. Born sometime in the latter half of the 23rd century BC, Enheduanna was the high priestess of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur. It was a political role as well as a religious one; as the daughter of a powerful king, Enheduanna was no stranger to affairs of the state. In her writing, she wielded her pen for peace, working to unite a fractured kingdom.

Her father was King Sargon, ruler of the Akkadians. He conquered an area in southern Iraq, Sumer, and she was put into power as a priestess of the moon god, Nanna. In her writings, she took a Sumerian goddess, Inanna, and fused her with an Akkadian goddess, Ishtar. She tried to unite these two different cultures, these two different people under her father’s reign. So she was a key political entity.

Sometimes we have these people where we know them by name and we know what their position was. But then there’s this other aspect of what was their everyday normal life, and it’s hard to grasp.

We have a representation of her on a disk where she is facilitating a ritual where a libation is being poured for the god. There’s a set of temple hymns that she wrote. And so her role has something to do with ritual and libations honoring the gods and facilitating that.

There’s something called the King’s List. It’s a list of all the kings that ruled and beside them is the list of the priestesses who were in power during their reigns. So I think that tells us a lot about the importance of the priestesses’ role within society, but also within the political atmosphere of the times.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/first-author-ever-mesopotamia-woman-enheduanna

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Sunday’s Useless News

This is all the news that no one can use……

Until recently the oldest love poem was considered to be the Song of Solomon……but unfortunately that is no longer true…..

The World’s Oldest Love Poem was discovered in the library of Ashurbanipal in Mesopotamia. Known as the Love Song of Shu-Sin, the World’s Oldest Love Poem is about both romantic and erotic love, and was read as a part of a sacred ritual known as the ‘sacred marriage.’ In honour of Valentines Day on February 14th, this video chats about the discovery of the poem, it’s part in the sacred marriage, and then it is read in full! Prior to the discovery of the Love Song of Shu-Sin, The Song of Solomon from the bible was considered the oldest love poem!

This piece of news may be a bit disturbing for some….but I like history disturbing or not…..

This is a health issue from 200 years ago….

A cure for headaches, acne and insanity……

For a long time, medicine was pre-occupied with the question “can this be solved by putting something in the butt?”

Take, for example, tobacco smoke enemas, in which 18th Century physicians saw drowning victims and attempted to de-deadify them by blowing tobacco smoke up their rectums with a pipe. Despite having no medical benefit whatsoever, the practice was popular, and enema kits lined the Thames like lifebelts, ready to be used as one final humiliation for somebody who was crap at swimming.

This practice ended sometime after 1800 when it became apparent that it didn’t really work, given how the anus famously isn’t really connected to the lungs, but doctors weren’t quite finished with having a poke around in the general area to see what happens just yet.

(iflscience.com)

Okay as long as we are talking about butts….

Going to the toilet is a vulnerable time for a species that’s grown accustomed to having their private parts covered up. As such, haunting scenes from TV and cinema of spiders and snakes (On A Plane) catching people quite literally with their trousers down can sit heavy on the minds of anxious toilet users. These people may find the concept of an outhouse quite concerning, but surely there’s nothing more dangerous than a moisture-seeking frog to be found at the bottom of an outdoor basin? Think again, says Alaska.

Here to provide you with some serious nightmare fuel is the poor fortune of a woman who last week was bitten on her behind by what’s suspected to have been a black bear. The offending outhouse toilet was in Alaska’s backcountry where bears aren’t uncommon. The Alaska Department of Natural Resource warns on its website, “Nothing will guarantee your safety in bear country, but knowledge of bears and proper behavior greatly reduce your risk.” The information page estimates that 95 percent of the time it’s people who are responsible for negative bear encounters. I think it’s safe to say, then, that the fate of Shannon Stevens sits firmly within the 5 percent exception. Though she admits to not checking the seat before sitting down, finding a bear beneath your butt surely constitutes an unforeseeable consequence of squatting with confidence.

https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/woman-receives-bear-bite-to-the-bare-behind-in-alaskan-outhouse-nightmare/amp.html

This next entry is not all that ‘useless’…..

KETO is the fad that has become very popular in the last couple of years…but is it all that healthy?

Ketogenic diets, which forgo carbohydrates to replace them with fats, have become extremely popular in recent years, rising to the top as the most-searched-for diet of 2020. Whilst these diets are effective in treating epilepsy and have applications in various other diseases, the evidence for use as a tool for weight loss in healthy individuals remains disputed. 

In a recent study performed on rats, researchers have suggested that keto diets are having a dramatic impact on people’s hearts. The results showed the high-fat-diet-induced changes within the rats’ hearts, reducing the production of mitochondria and creating scar tissue. Their work was published in the journal Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy. 

The basis of ketogenic diets revolves around bringing the body into a state of ketosis through consuming mostly fats. Ketosis is a normal metabolic response that kicks in when the body doesn’t have enough glucose to ensure enough energy is provided. The liver begins turning fat molecules into ketones, which are released into the bloodstream and used as an alternative energy source. 

https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/keto-diets-cause-scarring-of-heart-tissue-and-inhibit-mitochondria-production-in-rats/amp.html

There is the news that you cannot use (with the exception of one) for this Sunday.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Jason And Argonauts

The weekend once again I am struggling to find something not related to the silliness we call US society….especially the election comedic skit.

So I decided to educate rather than elucidate…..

Most adults know the myth of Jason and the Argonauts……either from school or the movies……those cheesy Italian movies…….but is it just a myth or could there be something more to the tale?

The myth of Jason and the Argonauts endured for centuries, mainly because its heroes’ exploits exemplified resilience and took them on adventures to new lands. The Argonauts, named for the ship they sailed on, the Argo, were gathered by legendary hero Jason. According to PBS, Jason is the rightful heir to the throne of Iolkis, but after his father died, his uncle, Pelias, stole the crown. After a bunch of adventures on his own, Jason returned to Iolkis to reclaim his birthright. Pelias, however, wanted to make him suffer. So he ordered the young man to go on an impossible quest to prove his worth. He had to get the fabled Golden Fleece.

The Ancient History Encyclopedia writes that the goddess Athena favored Jason, so to help him in this quest, she gifted him Greece’s first longboat, the Argo. Then, like Nick Fury, he assembled the greatest heroic team. He called on Hercules, Theseus, Orpheus, the founders of Rome — Castor and Pollux — and Peleus, Achilles’s father. This group of heroes set sail for the island of Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece.

According to the Ancient History Encyclopedia, historians think Jason and the Argonauts reflect the journey undertaken by the Myceneans in the 13th century B.C. The Myceneans had begun to explore the islands to the east of Greece and faced different cultures there, much like the Argonauts did. The Caucasus Mountains in the east reportedly was filled with gold — you know, like the Golden Fleece. CNN reported that archaeologists even found ruins that may have inspired the myth.

Read More: https://www.grunge.com/242783/the-legend-of-jason-and-the-argonauts-finally-explained/

Now when you watch that movie on TCM you will know the origins of the myth…..

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History Of The Dog Collar

That spikey thing that punkers wear to look “cool”…..but that is a post for another day…..

This post is for my readers that have a canine companion and a little history behind the association of the two, man and canine.

MoMo uses a harness…but I guess we can put that in the category of a collar.

The dog collar, so often taken for granted, has a long and illustrious history. Anyone fortunate enough to share their life with a dog in the present day is participating in an ancient tradition every time they place a collar around their dog’s neck and take it out for a walk. The dog collar is a global link between people in the present, no matter their nationality, religion, or political affiliation, which also connects them firmly with the past and each other.

According to the AVMA (American Veterinary Medical Association), 43,346,000 households in the United States own dogs, and the Insurance Information Institute, in their 2017 CE survey, concluded Americans spent $69.4 billion on their dogs in that year alone. It is no surprise that dogs are among the most popular and best-loved pets in the present day, but the designation of “man’s best friend” is no recent development. Dogs and humans have been walking together since ancient times and the dog collar has been the common denominator in every era.

The basic design of the collar has not changed since the time of ancient Mesopotamia but variations on the collar, specifically ornamentation and style, reflect the values of the various world cultures that kept dogs. These subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, alterations to the central design can be quite telling in the role dogs played and how they were regarded in different time periods and cultures.

The oldest depiction of what seems to be dogs on leashes –

https://www.ancient.eu/article/1605/a-brief-history-of-the-dog-collar/

And since most people are familiar with Rome…..their thoughts on dogs as well…..

Dogs were highly valued in ancient Rome, as they were in other cultures, and the Roman dog served many of the same purposes as it did in, say, Egypt and Persia, but with a significant difference in focus. Like the Egyptians, the Romans created their own artistic dog collars – some of gold – and, although dogs did not feature in the Roman afterlife (as they did with the Persians), they were considered the best protection against ghosts or evil spirits. The central difference between the Roman view of dogs and that of other cultures is that the Romans viewed dogs far more pragmatically

https://www.ancient.eu/article/1603/dogs–their-collars-in-ancient-rome/

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“lego ergo scribo”

Those Beauty Contests

FYI and History all in one place and on a Saturday to boot…….does life get any better?

Our all knowing president use to own the Miss Universe beauty thing…..have you ever asked where this staple of society got its start?

Well the Old Professor has your history lesson prepared (for those interested)….

There are lots of history blogs out there in the blogosphere….but not that many give the really cookie histories……you can depend on IST to be different…..

Beauty contests were first brought to the attention of the public back in the early days of the Byzantine Empire…..

A seldom-recognized historical antecedent to today’s beauty pageants is bride-shows that occurred early in the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine bride-shows selected from a wide-ranging search the bride for the Emperor or the Emperor’s heir. After becoming Empress, she sometimes went on to rule in her own right. The Byzantine bride-show thus provided a remarkably open opportunity for a woman to gain a place at the top of society.[1] In relation to ordinary person’s lives, Byzantine bride-shows suggest risks in a mother dominating the choice of her son’s wife even in a relatively tolerant society.

Men in pursuing intimate relationships are usually attracted to beautiful women. Today, that preference tends to be disparaged. For being attracted to a woman who was not fat, one young man recently was called bigoted and mean, and he was slapped. At a much higher level of social salience, the Harvard men’s soccer team recently had their whole season canceled because some team members were privately rating the attractiveness of members of the women’s soccer team. Simply stating that young, slender, warmly receptive women are much more sexually attractive than old, fat, bitterly men-hating women is well on its way to becoming a criminal offense in modern, democratic societies.

Byzantine bride-shows: mothers dominate sons in choosing wives

It is possible that there were other occasions in his but this is the one that got set down in the histories….

After reading this let your mind wonder to the past…..what were the categories?  How about the wardrobe?

Do let me know your thoughts.

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Class Dismissed!

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“lego ergo scribo”

Pirates Of The Mediterranean

God NO! This is not some pathetic off-shoot of the wildly popular Caribbean theme…..besides I cannot afford the price of Johnny Depp……

This post is basically about the noble employment as a pirate in the days of yore (ancient times)…….

Mediterranean stretching from the time of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten (r. 1353-1336 BCE) and throughout the Middle Ages (c. 476-1500 CE). Piracy in the Mediterranean remains a persistent threat in the present day only with different kinds of ships and more advanced technology.

Historians sometimes telescope the history of piracy for narrative convenience and wind up implying or even claiming that piracy in the Mediterranean began with the decline of the Seleucid Empire in the 2nd century BCE and ended when Pompey the Great (l. c. 106-48 BCE) defeated the Cilician pirates at the Battle of Coracesium in 67 BCE when, actually, Egyptian records substantiate piratical activities in the Mediterranean centuries earlier and Roman accounts report its continuance for centuries afterwards.

Piracy was engaged in by governments and was often considered a legitimate act of war. Pirates were not always the “outsiders” flying under their own flag but were frequently employed by governments and were encouraged in their piracy by the slave trade which continued throughout antiquity. Long after Pompey had defeated the Cilician pirates, Rome continued to rely on them for slaves for the empire and, after that empire fell, piracy and the slave trade continued for centuries.

https://www.ancient.eu/Piracy/

This brings us to the US of 1800….and the presidency of Thomas Jefferson…..

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson was elected president of the United States. As a Democratic-Republican, he was deeply suspicious of a regular military establishment. He worried that professional officers might turn into a new aristocracy (a privileged ruling class) and that professional soldiers could threaten or coerce the people, depriving of them of their inalienable human rights.

Jefferson initially cut back on the armed forces. For maritime security, he felt that America could be protected by a fleet of small coastal gunboats. He sold off or decommissioned most of the Navy’s conventional warships

Thomas Jefferson and the Mediterranean Pirates

Jefferson’s paranoia led to the rise of the Barbary pirates in American history…..

The Barbary pirates (or, more accurately, Barbary privateers) operated out of four North African bases–Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and various ports in Morocco–between the 16th and 19th centuries. They terrorized seafaring traders in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, “sometimes,” in the words of John Biddulph’s 1907 history of piracy, “venturing into the mouth of the [English} channel to make a capture.”

The privateers worked for North African Muslim deys, or rulers, themselves subjects of the Ottoman Empire, which encouraged privateering as long as the empire received its share of tributes. Privateering had two aims: to enslave captives, who were usually Christian, and to ransom hostages for tribute.

The Barbary pirates played a significant role in defining the foreign policy of the United States in its earliest days. The pirates provoked the United States’ first wars in the Middle East, compelled the United States to build a Navy, and set several precedents, including hostage crises involving the ransoming of American captives and military American military interventions in the Middle East that have been relatively frequent and bloody since.

https://www.thoughtco.com/who-were-the-barbary-pirates-2352842

Some historians like to push the narrative that the US brought the Barbary pirates to their knees….it is BS…..Jefferson decided to pay them their ransoms and agreed to a treaty with them.  But the propaganda of the day told it differently.

The mention of pirates brings up romantic illusions of swashbuckling situations and the romance that surrounded these men and women…..but that is what Hollywood sees….reality is far more hard than the fantasies of the movies.

Class Dismissed!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The Terror Of The Ancient World

Sunday and a short history lesson…..

I know that sounds like a SciFi movie waiting for funding…..but not this time…..this post is about a people that held the ancient world hostage for decades…the mysterious Sea People.

Sea People?

Yes the Sea People…the very people that brought about the collapse of the Bronze Age…..a short video to help you understand just how ruthless these people were…..

https://youtu.be/3ycOut4qkFk
 
The history of the Sea People has been masked by history for centuries….but now there is a new found interest….for me I have always had an interest since I have studied Middle East history and the history of conflict, something the Sea People were experts at carrying out.
 

“Sea Peoples” sort of sounds like the name for a band of Disney villains, or maybe something you would mail order from the back of a comic book in the 1960s. It doesn’t sound much like a fitting moniker for the mysterious group of people that helped bring the Bronze Age to its knees. Maybe if someone dropped the “s” at the end of the name, because seriously, “Sea Peoples” is what a 2-year-old would say while trying to announce the presence of humans on a beach in San Diego.

The Sea Peoples would probably be a bit miffed to learn that today, thousands of years after they terrorized the ancient world, almost no one remembers them. Worse, some people don’t think they really existed, and even worse, we think their name is kind of stupid. But the Sea Peoples did exist, and yes their name sounds kind of stupid but that doesn’t actually diminish the part where they literally destroyed civilization. So here’s the truth about the Sea Peoples, those dudes with the stupid name who you probably never heard of until exactly this moment.

https://www.grunge.com/174222/the-truth-about-the-sea-peoples-who-terrorized-the-ancient-world/

These raiders were a scourge in the Bronze Age kinda like the Vikings in the Dark Ages were to Europe….

The Sea People and how they devastated the Ancient World…..https://allthatsinteresting.com/sea-peoples

Then there is this for the lazy…..

My Sunday history lesson as well as a bit of archeology thrown in….

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