jamermoo
he/him, bi, uh idk what else to put
113 posts
Latest Posts by jamermoo
Ways to Honour the Minoan Snake Goddess
𓆙𓆙𓆙𓆙𓆙𓆙
Minoan bull-leaping girls
Art by capelinssm
✨ tag yourself ✨ but with Aegean Scripts! Mainly Bronze Age, with a sprinkle of Iron Age (Cypriot Syllabary).
TERFs die mad: you just reblogged a nasty transgender person with pronouns and all who did this historical look to explore their cultural history as well as express their own nonbinary identity in a way that resonates with them. An edit I wish I didn’t have to make on this post
I’ll try to post the actual pictures I took soon, but I was bored today and wanted to shirk some other responsibilities, so I decided to do some general vague Minoan or Mycenaean look since it’s been on the mind and also my hair was looking really good today and I wanted to take advantage of that haha
they lived, they served cunt, and then disappeared from history
This just screamed Ariadne and Dionysus to me, so here’s my take on them!
The Toreador Fresco, Knossos Palace, Crete, c.1500 BC
Dolphins Fresco, Palace of Knossos (& detail)
c. 1700-1450 B.C.
Stunning Frescoes of a Mysterious Dionysian Cult Discovered in Ancient Pompeii
Created more than a century before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E., the wall paintings provide rare insights into secret rituals conducted in the Roman city.
Archaeologists in Pompeii have uncovered a series of nearly life-size frescoes spanning three walls of an ancient banquet hall. Set against a ruby-red backdrop, the wall paintings depict female followers of Dionysus—the Greek god of wine and ecstasy—engaged in secretive cult rituals.
Also known as maenads or bacchantes, the women have swords in their hands and slaughtered animals draped across their bare shoulders. Alongside flute-piping satyrs, they’re engaged in a wild, ritualistic dance, while shellfish, eels, squid and poultry dangle above them. In the center of it all, a clothed woman awaits her initiation into the cult.
Pompeii is full of colorful frescoes, but this one is particularly rare. The only other large wall painting depicting a Dionysian ceremony was unearthed in the so-called Villa of the Mysteries in the ancient city’s suburbs in 1909, according to a statement from the Pompeii Archaeological Park.
Known as a megalography—a Greek term for a large-scale painting—the banquet hall fresco was uncovered at the newly excavated House of Thiasus. It dates to the first century B.C.E., more than 100 years before Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E. and cast pumice and ash down upon Pompeii.
“In 100 years’ time, today will be remembered as historic,” Alessandro Giuli, the Italian culture minister, told reporters at the unveiling of the wall paintings on Wednesday, per Reuters’ Crispian Balmer. “Alongside the Villa of the Mysteries, this fresco forms an unparalleled testament to the lesser-known aspects of ancient Mediterranean life.”
As Giuli suggests, the festivals depicted in the frescoes were thoroughly secretive, even in antiquity.
“These were mystery cults, so what they did remains a mystery, even in the ancient written sources,” Sophie Hay, an archaeologist at Pompeii, tells the London Times’ Philip Willan.
Even so, the frescoes at Pompeii offer valuable insights into what worship of Dionysus, also known as the Roman god Bacchus, entailed.
Wine, of course, was central to these festivities. But researchers think cult members may have also consumed other substances, like opium, to enter “trance-like states,” Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove writes.
The women in the fresco are both hunters and dancers, suggesting that the duality of slaughter and revelry was a central tenet. The clothed, mortal woman who is awaiting initiation is depicted as “oscillating between these two extremes, two forms of the female being at the time,” Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the archaeological park, says in the statement.
“For the ancients, the bacchante or maenad expressed the wild, untameable side of women; the woman who abandons her children, the house and the city, who breaks free from male order to dance freely, go hunting and eat raw meat in the mountains and the woods,” he adds. In contrast, Zuchtriegel explains, were the women who emulated the goddess Venus and lived by the dictates of Roman society.
“The question is, what do you want to be in life, the hunter or the prey?” Zuchtriegel told reporters at the unveiling.
The hunting scenes may also stand as analogues for life and death. In the House of Thiasus, one woman eats raw meat. At the Villa of Mysteries, one breastfeeds a young goat.
“It’s the double function of death and rebirth. Dionysus dies and is reborn. Through initiation into the cult, you are born again,” Zuchtriegel says to the London Times.
By 186 B.C.E., these festivals were at risk of dying out, as Roman authorities attempted to crack down on the scandalous ceremonies. But the presence of the paintings in the House of Thiasus and the Villa of Mysteries suggest that the secret rituals survived.
Although archaeological work continues, the frescoes are now on public display.
By Eli Wizevich.
-Pros to me doing my field research alone: nobody saw me sprain my ankle by tripping over a gopher hole
-Cons to me doing my field research alone: I keep pointing at bugs/critters going "woah look a cool bug/critter!" and nobody's there to go "woah lemme see!" so I'm really just entertaining myself only
realized today is earth day so i'm celebrating with a sketch of one of my favorite birds: the eurasian hoopoe!!
pretty morning & soft eyes
Western Fluted Point Tradition: unique to the Americas, a flute removed from the base of a stone projectile point ahead of attaching to a haft can provide information about technological progress amongst the first Americans.
The Nahuatl word tlamatini (literally, "he who knows things") meant something akin to "thinker-teacher"--a philosopher, if you will... Many tlamatinime (the plural form of the word) taught at the elite academies that trained the next generation of priests, teachers, and high administrators...
In Nahuatl rhetoric, things were frequently represented by the unusual device of naming two of their elements—a kind of doubled Homeric epithet. Instead of directly mentioning his body, a poet might refer to “my hand, my foot” (noma nocxi), which the savvy listener would know was a synecdoche, in the same way that readers of English know that writers who mention “the crown” are actually talking about the entire monarch, not just the headgear. Similarly, the poet’s speech would be “his words, his breath” (itlatol ihiyo). A double-barreled term for “truth” is neltilitztli tzintliztli, which means something like “fundamental truth, true basic principle.” In Nahuatl, the words almost shimmer with connotation: what was true was well grounded, stable and immutable, enduring above all.
Because we human beings are transitory, our lives as ephemeral as dreams, the tlamatinime suggested that immutable truth is by its nature beyond human experience. On the ever-changing earth, wrote LeĂłn-Portilla, the Mexican historian, "nothing is 'true' in the Nahuatl sense of the word." Time and again, the tlamatinime wrestled with this dilemma. How can beings of the moment grasp the perduring? It would be like asking a stone to understand mortality.
According to LeĂłn-Portilla, one exit from this philosophical blind alley was seen by the fifteenth-century poet Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, who described it metaphorically, as poets will, by invoking the coyolli bird, known for its bell-like song:
He goes his way singing, offering flowers.
And his words rain down
Like jade and quetzal plumes.
Is this what pleases the Giver of Life?
Is that the only truth on earth?
Ayocuan's remarks cannot be fully understood out of the Nahuatl context, LeĂłn-Portilla argued. "Flowers and song" was a standard double epithet for poetry, the highest art; "jade and quetzal feathers" was a synecdoche for great value, in the way that Europeans might refer to "gold and silver." The song of the bird, spontaneously produced, stands for aesthetic inspiration. Ayocuan was suggesting, LeĂłn-Portilla said, that there is a time when humankind can touch the enduring truths that underline our fleeting lives. That time is at the moment of artistic creation. "From whence come the flowers [the artistic creations] that enrapture man?" asks the poet. "The songs that intoxicate, the lovely songs?" And he answers: "Only from His [that is, Ometeotl's] home do they come, from the innermost part of heaven." Through art alone, the Mexica said, can human beings approach the real.
-Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.
sultanahmet camii | blue mosque 🌿
detaylar.
Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque by paandeli.
The Tortoise Trainer by Osman Hamdi Bey, 1906
Order of Osmania star, Turkey(TĂĽrkiye). Ottoman Empire. 1862 CE.
The Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
The Last Emperor
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Based on Constantine XI, but I painted it because I also feel that I am not living up to expectations
A Byzantine Gold Collier with Emeralds, Sapphires, Amethysts and Pearls, from a workshop in Constantinople (late 6th-7th Century AD).
Byzantine Miku edited by my mother
edit: mom says this is the first time she's gotten a thousand likes or comments on anything, she is @ ikonimaalari on instagram if you want to see what she usually does and also she now knows what serving cunt means
Striped skunks By: Edward R. Degginger From: Nature's Unlovables 1990
Time Travel Question 61: Middle Ages and Much Earlier
These Questions are the result of suggestions from the previous iteration.
This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct grouping.
Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration.
Early Modern Korean Fashion ✦ Source
Bronze wine vessel, China, Song Dynasty, 960-1279 AD
from The Burrell Collection, Glasgow