ganymedecatamitus

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San Sebastián by Aurelio Cabrera y Gallardo (1870-1936).

Municipal Museum of Fine Arts of Santa Cruz de Tenerife

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SIN TíTULO by René Peña

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Star-crowned Ariadne and her loving husband

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Odysseus in this art is killin me. Dick out, that crossed leg stance, holding his knee, his lil smile n cape. What a man

also being depicted with a small penis in greek art and sculpture was a good thing, there are some good articles out there about why! but it’s a good thing in art

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AHH!! Quickly!! The artefacts have escaped the museum!! 😘😘 This video is adorable :D

These ladies are wearing Tang Dynasty hanfu, the famous "golden age" of Chinese history. Artefacts show that aesthetics during this dynasty favored fuller shaped women, if you've ever seen the figures from the museums these ladies look like exact replicas :D

Video src: 包意凡 【博物馆闭馆时间到，我俩要粗去玩！】 https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1iJ4m1K7Mq/

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Cats Stealing Food in Paintings

Still Life with Cat (1705) by Desportes, It's no use crying over spilt milk (1880) by Frank Paton, Still Life of the Remnants of a Meal with a Lunging Cat (18th Century) by Alexandre-François Desportes, Fish Still Life with Two Cats (1781) by Martin Ferdinand Quadal, Still Life with a Cat and a Mackerel on a Table Top (18th Century) by Giovanni Rivalta, The Collared Thief (1860) by William James Webbe, Cat Stealing a String of Sausages (17th Century) by Abraham van Beyeren, Still Life with a Cat (1760) by Sebastiano Lazzari, Kitchen Still Life with Fish and Cat (ca. 1650) by Sebastian Stoskopff, An Oyster Supper (1882) by Horatio Henry Couldery, Still Life with an Ebony Chest (17th Century) by Frans Snyders, Still Life with a Cat (1724) by Alexandre-Francois Desportes, A Cat Attacking Dead Game (18th Century) by Alexandre-François Desportes, Still Life of Fresh-Water Fish with a Cat (1656) by Pieter Claesz, Still Life with Fruits and Ham with a Cat and a Parrot (18th Century) by Alexandre-Francois Desportes, A Cat Holding a Fish in Its Mouth (18th Century) by Sebastiano Lazzari, Still Life with a Cat and a Hare (18th Century) by Desportes, Still Life with Cat and Rayfish (1728) by Jean-Siméon Chardin, A Cat with Dead Game (1711) by Alexandre-Francois Desportes, Still Life with Cat and Fish (1728) by Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin

Via James Lucas on X/Twitter

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Have you seen this post?

You probably have. It currently has over 120,000 notes, largely because of this addition.

Of course it's going to get reblogged, this kind of unsourced factoid does numbers on here. But something about it wasn't quite right.

A bit of searching turned up the origin of the "fact".

Alright, so it's someone who posted this on reddit 4 years ago and somehow ended up in the search hits. And the post confuses the electric eel (from South America) with the electric catfish (from the Nile, which the Egyptians would have known about).

Reminder: this is an electric eel (Electrophorus electricus). It is from South America. (image from Wikipedia)

And this is an electric catfish (Malapterurus electricus). It is from the Nile and would have been familiar to the ancient Egyptians. (image from Wikipedia)

And then of course people were speculating in the notes to that post about trade routes between South America and Egypt. Excellent scholarship everyone.

At this point I was ready to call it another made-up internet fact that gets reified by people repeating it. But something was still bothering me.

An ancient Egyptian slab from 3100 BC. What could that be...

Oh.

The Narmer palette. It's the goddamn Narmer palette. (image, once again, from Wikipedia)

So where is this "angry catfish"?

It's not the Egyptian name for the electric catfish.

It's... Narmer. It's Narmer himself.

Narmer's name is written as above (detail of top middle of the palette), using the catfish (n`r) and the chisel (mr), giving N'r-mr. The chisel is associated with pain, so this reads as "painful catfish", "striking catfish", or, yes, "angry catfish" or other similar variants, although some authors have suggested that it means "Beloved of [the catfish god] Nar".

So.

Where does this leave us?

It would appear that this redditor not only confused electric eels with electric catfish, but also confused a Pharaoh's name with the name of a fish. And then it got pushed to the top search hits by a crappy search engine and shared uncritically on tumblr.

In short, "the electric eel is called angry catfish" factoid actually literacy error. Angry Catfish, who ruled upper Egypt and smote his enemies, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

Also the Arabic name for the electric catfish is raad (thunder) or raada (thunderer).

References

Afsaruddin, A., & Zahniser, A. H. M. (1997). Humanism, culture, and language in the Near East: studies in honor of Georg Krotkoff. Eisenbrauns.

Clayton, P. A. (2001). Chronicle of the Pharaohs. Thames & Hudson.

Godron, G. (1949). A propos du nom royal. Annales du Service des antiquités de l'Egypte, 49, 217-221.

Sperveslage, G., & Heagy, T. C. (2023). A tail's tale: Narmer, the catfish, and bovine symbolism. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 109(1), 3-319.

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I seriously need people to understand that Penelope didn't wait for Odysseus for twenty years because social expectations dictated it, or because she was expected to be a faithful wife even untill she died.

Actually it was exactly the opposite: her father wanted her to remarry, some of the women wanted her to remarry, her son made her understand that if she took another husband and left home he wouldn't stop her. And at a certain point she recounts that before leaving for war Odysseus had told her that if he were to die, she could remarry whoever she liked (making sure first that Telemachus would take the throne without problems).

I need people to understand that Penelope's choice was entirely personal. She didn't remarry because her love for Odysseus had never abandoned her, because she knew that with no one else could she find that complete identity of thought and mind, that homophrosyne that she had with him.

It was not the choice of a woman who was modest and trapped by the expectations of her time. It was the choice of a woman who was freer and more independent than others, who preferred to remain without the protection of a man rather than resign herself to not having HER man.

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yoooo guys these wings my dad made look INSANE i can’t wait to try them tomorrow

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Alan Parker, Joe Leitel and Bruce Reed Ben-Hurry (1959) dir. Richard Fontaine

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Honestly, part of why it irritates me when people act performatively shocked at the homophobia in 2000s media is it wasn't just media. "Can you believe this aired in 2008" buddy, in 2008 I was having shit thrown at me from moving cars for having long hair, and you wanna get worked up about sitcoms?

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Lo so, siete a bocca aperta. L’opera è di Darian Rodriguez Mederos, classe 1992, artista cubano di cui sentiremo parlare ancora.

via Jacopo Veneziani 

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I'm a really big fan of the way demons were, for some time, depicted as being covered in beastly faces. Especially on their torso. Thinking up a tattoo in that style. Would you know of a collection of examples? Or some particularly interesting sources? Trying to collect them for inspiration.

gastrocephalic demons my beloved! idk of any collections but here are of some of my favs, all from 15th or 16th c. manuscripts 😌

signatures & links to the digitized manuscripts (in order): Hannover, GWLB, Ms I 57, fol. 27v // Solothurn, ZB, Cod. S II 43, fol. 367v // Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 134, fol. 99r // Paris, BnF, Latin 1171, fol. 71r // Munich, BSB, Cgm 48, fol. 95r // Luzern, ZHB, Msc. 39. fol., fol. 71v // Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 134, fol. 95v // Paris, BnF, Français 1537, fol. 54r // Gotha, Forschungsbibl., Cod. Chart. A 594, fol. 73v // Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 3085, fol. 196r // Berlin, SBB, Ms. germ. fol. 245, fol. 56v // Paris, BnF, Latin 1171, fol. 56r // Munich, BSB, Clm 28345, fol. 109r // Paris, BnF, Français 166, fol. 139r // Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 134, fol. 67v // Augsburg, UB, Cod. I.3.8º 1, fol. 150v // LA, Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig XV 9, fol. 280r // Valenciennes, Médiathèque Simone Veil, 244 (234), fol. 27r // Paris, BnF, Français 166, fol. 79v //Nürnberg, STN, Cent. V, App. 34a, fol. 114r // Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 134, fol. 83r

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I did a Danaé mini comic cause my heart aches for her

Hope you like it :3

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Cassandra for a class presentation :D

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trojan war WRAPPED

you spent 10 YEARS at war

overall, you killed 1685 trojan soldiers. that's almost 17 hecatombs worth!

aristeia moment! your best day of fighting was in year 9, where you sent 23 souls of warriors to hades in a single battle

you were saved by hera 4 times

you exchanged armor with 2 trojan warriors. zeus xenios smiles upon you!

check out your top 5 commanders:

nestor

odysseus

agamemnon

menelaus

ajax the greater