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Shield Maidens, Bell Curves and Strong Women - R. J. Eliason

#gender #history | History buffs will know this already, but in ancient times it was not uncommon for armies to lose more men from starvation and disease on the way to the war then in battle. Life was difficult in the best of times. For soldiers in the field it was brutal. They marched for weeks on near starvation rations. Poor hygiene led to epidemics of disease. Poor sanitation and no knowledge of infection meant that many of those injured in battle died of infections between battles.While statistics almost invariably show men to have greater brute strength, they just as consistently show women to have greater constitutional strength. In natural disasters women tend to have a higher survival rate than men. (A lot of this can be chalked up to simple estrogen and body fat. Higher body fat gives women a bigger cushion against malnutrition.) If you are considering who to take on a long campaign with you, this might figure into your thinking. The point of all this comes to this: being able to lift more weight over your head doesn’t necessarily translate into being a better warrior, or having a better chance at survival. There are many factors and brute strength is just one of them.

1 year ago | View Shared by tei

Kóryos - Wikipedia

#history | The kóryos (Proto-Indo-European: "army, people under arms" or "detachment, war party") refers to the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European brotherhood of warriors in which unmarried young males served for several years, as a rite of passage into manhood, before their full integration into society. Scholars have hypothesized the existence of the kóryos based on later Indo-European traditions and myths that feature links between landless young males, perceived as an age-class not yet fully integrated into the community of the married men; their service in a "police-army" sent away for part of the year in the wild (where they hunted animals and raided foreign communities), then defending the host society for the rest of the year; their mystical self-identification with wolves and dogs as symbols of death, lawlessness, and warrior fury; and the idea of a liminality between invulnerability and death on one side, and youth and adulthood on the other side.

2 years ago | View Shared by tei

Spanking, Signing, Reading: On the Medieval Use of Hands ‹ Literary Hub

#history #art | Hands are conspicuous in this piece. They touch, slap, pat, hitch, point, grope, caress, spank. The more we look, the more of them we see. The woman whose skirt the man is under rests her left hand on his head, her right at the same time pointing with a strangely elongated finger upward to the assembled crowd. The pair of spankers hitch up their skirts with grabbing motions. The bearded figure in the lower left, who presumably is up—or should that be under—next seems to be using his hands to part the crowd, edging his way between the women with flattened palms.

2 years ago | View Shared by tei

Engineering in the ancient world : Landels, John G. (John Gray), 1926- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

#history #classics | Engineering in the ancient world

2 years ago | View Shared by tei

Royal Oak Armoury – custom armour of every age and culture

#history #armoury | Ancient armoury in Saskatoon!

2 years ago | View Shared by tei

In the melee of a medieval battle, how could you tell who you were suppose to be fighting? : AskHistorians

#history | It pleases us to herein correct, for the benefit of our most loyal subjects, the egregious misconceptions about warfare that the vile and perfidious "movie" The King has wrought.

3 years ago | View Shared by tei

What was sex like when most people lived in 1 room/1 bedroom homes? : AskHistorians

#history #sexuality | They just had sex. Couples would have sex with their children or relatives in the bed, there wasn't the sense of taboo or privacy around it that we have today.

3 years ago | View Shared by tei

'Have I the strength to kill her?' | Fiction | The Guardian

#writing #history #horror | The Gibbons twins spoke their own language, hated each other, took up arson and wound up in Broadmoor. Perfect stuff for opera, says librettist April de Angelis

3 years ago | View Shared by tei

When a former Nazi meets a Holocaust survivor - YouTube

#history

4 years ago | View Shared by tei

During the 1918 Flu Epidemic, Pet Parents Put Masks on Their Cats - Atlas Obscura

#history

4 years ago | View Shared by tei

Histoire d'O

#history #bdsm #pronz | French text of Histoire d'O

4 years ago | View Shared by tei

Florence Nightingale used mathematics to improve health care | CBC Radio

#medicine #math #history | Florence Nightengale was not only a nurse, she was a statistician as well.