#Ancient Iberian Cultures

[gwydpolls]

Time Travel Question 48: Early Modernish and Earlier 3

These Questions are the result of suggestions a the previous iteration.This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct earlier time grouping. In some cases a culture lasted a really long time and I grouped them by whether it was likely the later or earlier grouping made the most sense with the information I had. (Invention ofs tend to fall in an earlier grouping if it's still open. Ones that imply height of or just before something tend to get grouped later, but not always. Sometimes I'll split two different things from the same culture into different polls because they involve separate research goals or the like).

Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration. All cultures and time periods welcome.

[useless-catalanfacts]

The archaeological site Iberian Citadel of Calafell (Penedès, Catalonia) was a fortified residence built by the Cessetani people (one of the Ancient Iberian peoples) and inhabited between the 6th and 2nd centuries BC. Its destruction was probably due to the Roman occupation.

A part of the archaeological site has been rebuilt in the original techniques to serve two purposes: one, it allowed archaeologists to research the building methods through experimental archaeology; and two, to show what an Ancient Iberian village from around the year 200 BC would look like. You can see the result in these photos: the foundations and lower part of the walls are made of stone to keep out the humidities from the ground, and the rest of wall is made of rammed earth, with ceilings using wooden beams and reed fences. The research focused on those elements that rarely leave a trace, for example the inclination of the roofs (when the walls and roofs are made of a material that doesn't resist the passage of time, like rammed earth) and water draining.

Photos from Enoturisme Penedès and Visit Calafell. You can find the results of the reseach in the article linked here.

[ancientstuff]

These are beautiful.

[historyfiles]

Arevaci Culture: the Arevaci were nominally a Celtic tribe, one of a mass of such tribes in pre-Roman Iberia, but that Celtic ethnicity certainly involved several layers of Celtic migration, plus Iberian influences which could still be detected.

[bernievm]

Imagine discovering an #ancient #alphabet by sheer chance—a script that belonged to a long-lost civilization.

This is precisely what happened recently, shedding light on a forgotten culture that once thrived in what is now modern-day #Turkey.

The 20-centimeter (7.8-inch) #tablet was recently unearthed during an archaeological dig near the #Spanish town of #Guareña. Known as Casas del Turuñuelo, the site belongs to the late #Tartessian civilization that developed in the southwestern #Iberian Peninsula around 2,500 years ago.

When the Spanish National Research Council revealed the discovery on June 6, they simply explained that it depicted battling individuals who were identified as warriors.

The news caught the attention of Joan Ferrer i Jané, a computer scientist and expert in #Paleohispanic #languages at the University of Barcelona, who quickly realized the artifact was even more significant than the initial reports had suggested.

The newly found inscriptions promise to unlock secrets of the past, offering insights into the language, culture, and daily life of a people lost to history.

This remarkable find not only enriches our understanding of ancient civilizations but also sparks curiosity and excitement about the mysteries that still lie beneath the earth.

Read more at IFLScience.

https://www.iflscience.com/ancient-alphabet-of-a-long-lost-civilization-stumbled-upon-by-chance-74835

[iberiantalesif-game]

Genres: Heavy romance, Fall of your entire culture, Ancient history slice of life, Found family

Rating : 16+ for depictions of violence, mature themes and language. (List to be expanded on)

Summary

Life was once tranquil on the isolated coast of your city, surrounded by a loving family and promising prospects for success in your societal position. However, tranquility shattered as flames engulf your city, escape becomes the only viable option, if luck favors you enough to evade the soldiers blocking your path that is.

Yet, amidst the chaos, you realize that the existence of a stray and that of a Roman slave may not be so disparate.

If the gods truly have a plan for you, their track record thus far suggests they're not worthy of your trust either. But when a fate worse than death is upon your door, you really cant get picky can't you?

Features!

Assume the role of a member of an Iberian civilization dwelling along the coast.

Customize your protagonist's background as a warrior or a priest. Both with diferent odds on their favour.

Flee from the Romans (or choose otherwise) and embark on a quest to find a new place to call home.

Decide between preserving your culture from extinction or embracing the dawn of new societal norms, and confront the repercussions of your choices.

Engage in romantic pursuits with one of the available romance options. (Witch will be expanding as the game develops and progresses)

The RO´s Cast

Theodosius (Theo) Aurelius [He/Him]

Theo resembles his father´s features, tall, blond and with eyes coloured by the sea. He also has a cold temperament and a tendency to keep people at arm's length.

But being a powerful Roman family heir might make him a good ally. The truth is that you have no option but to please him or his father who bought you, all in hopes of a change of fortune. Or so you tell yourself, as the cold man shows you a mercy not proper of Romans. Maybe they are not as beastly as you thought after all?

Eon[He/Him]

Eon is a huge man, with signature red hair, heavily tanned skin and a green stare. So is his entire family, a mercenary group from the northern city of Numantine.

With a world of differences in between and a war that has shaken the safety of the entire peninsula, he is as good a bet on survival as it gets. But when the times can't seem rougher, this giant man offers a sweetness that you have rarely known amidst despair, maybe one strong enough to survive hunger?

Demo:

[elbiotipo]

The most annoying thing about generic medieval fantasy slop is that most of it has basically nothing to do with real European history. Tolkien's stuff was based on folklore and myth from anglo-saxon England, so the omission of things like religion and social classes makes sense. But most modern DnD-like fantasy stuff is based on worlds that are much less mythical, and yet they're all exactly the same while having not much to do with real europe. There's no notable distinction between the names and languages of people from one country and another, they're all random european names that come from everywhere from Ireland to portugal to greece to Novgorod, with a few made up european-sounding names with no thought behind them. The exact way social stratification varied, like how some serfs from the HRE would be trained as knights and given valued positions as the emperor's Ministeriales; or the difference between serfs, free peasants who rent, free peasants who have common land, and gentry; or the antipathy between HRE Princes and the Free Cities' elites; or that the centralisation of the governments of the iberian crowns that was made possible by an increase in burghers who studied Roman Law and became Civil Servants; or how feudal lords didn't do much administration and were rarely even literate; is all completely ignored in favour of a worldbuilding-wise nonsensical stylistic mish-mash of anglo-saxon England, Arthurian Britain as imagined by the French, ancient-regime france and the late-medieval Hanse. I wanted to ask you something but I got lost in the rant, sorry

Don't matter, you can keep talking to me like that all night if you wish, in fact, feel free to get more comfortable over there

ahem

I'm very tired of the Middle Ages, even with well researched settings, I believe we reached a point of saturation. I do wonder when this omnipresence of the Middle Ages in fantasy came from, because while there are undertones of it in Tolkien for example, it doesn't scream Middle Ages (more of Arthurian and Anglo-Saxon legend though) I have a feeling there is more to this relatively Middle Ages obsession, because it's even widespread in pop-culture in a way that I feel other time periods aren't.

But what bothers me is the same as you Anon, the fact there is a lot of interesting things to explore about the Middle Ages, and instead it's treated as a shallow aesthetic, as a monolith that can be just used as decoration for your story. Because that's in fact my main complaint with worldbuilding, when cultures are treated as interchangeable monoliths, and then every setting is the same; and if your setting is generic and flat, it means that you could switch your characters to any other setting and that makes them generic and flat. And what is interesting about Middle Ages Europe is that people back then, like any past societies, had very different worldviews and very different ways of organizing their lives. You wouldn't just exchange a knight into a modern soldier or cop and it would be the same. The life of people back then was different, and I would expect a fantasy work inspired by that to reflect it.

Many don't seem to want to engage with that though. They want the aesthetics without any thought about the societies, culture, economics, dynamics that were there. And to be honest, at this point, those aesthetics are not even that compelling anymore.

[archaeologicalnews]

Ancient human remains buried in Spanish caves were subsequently manipulated and utilized

Caves served as sites for burial and later modification of human remains for thousands of years in the Iberian Peninsula, according to a study published September 20, 2023, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Zita Laffranchi and Marco Milella of the University of Bern, Switzerland, and Rafael Martinez Sanchez, Universidad de Córdoba, Spain, and colleagues.

The use of caves as burial sites is a cultural phenomenon with a broad distribution in both space and time. In the southern Iberian Peninsula, this practice became particularly common starting around the 4th millennium BCE. Also common in the archaeological sites of this region is evidence of manipulation of buried human remains, although the cultural meaning behind this is largely unclear. Read more.

[madamlaydebug]

Moor or Moreno is a Spanish word that has several meanings, including "dark-skinned" or "brown-skinned". It can also refer to someone who has a dark complexion.

The Moors who rulled Spain..

Tariq ibn-Ziyad

In A.D. 711, a group of North African Muslims led by the Berber general, Tariq ibn-Ziyad, captured the Iberian Peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal). Known as al-Andalus, the territory became a prosperous cultural and economic center where education and the arts and sciences flourished.12 Dec 2019

Ancient African Kingdoms

Black history

[probablyasocialecologist]

As used, the term ‘precolonial’ Africa and the distortions it represents cannot illuminate our understanding of Africa and its history. More importantly, it is wrong to think of colonialism as a non-African phenomenon that was only brought in from elsewhere and imposed on the continent. Africa has given rise to a rich tapestry of diverse colonialisms originating in different parts of the continent. How are we to understand them? For example, if ‘precolonial Morocco’ refers to the time before France colonised Morocco, it must deny that the 800-year Moorish colonisation of the Iberian Peninsula, much of present-day France and much of North Africa was a colonialism. For, if it were, then ‘colonial Morocco’ must predate ‘precolonial Morocco’. I do not know how any of this helps us understand the history of Morocco. Similarly, a ‘precolonial’ Egypt that refers to Egypt before modern European imperialism would also deny Mohammed Ali’s colonial adventures at the head of Egypt in southern Europe and Asia Minor. Was ancient Egypt part of some precolonial formation? That strains credulity. To conceive of the history of Africa and Africans in terms only, or primarily, of their relation to modern European empires disappears the history of Africans as colonisers of realms beyond the continent’s land borders, especially in Europe and Asia. It is bad enough that the term distorts the history of African states’ involvement in overseas provinces. It is worse that it misdescribes the evolution of different African polities over time. The deployment of ‘precolonial Africa’ is undergirded by a few implausible assumptions. We assume either that there were no previous forms of colonialism in the continent, or that they do not matter. We talk as if colonialism was brought to Africa by Europe, after the 1884-85 Berlin West Africa Conference. But it takes only a pause to discover that this is false. African history is replete with accounts of empires and kingdoms. By their nature, empires incorporate elements of colonisation in them. If this be granted, Africa must have had its fair share of colonisers and colonialists in its history. When, according to the mythohistory (the founding myth of the empire) of Mali, Sundiata gathered different nations, cultures, political leaders and others to form the empire in the mid-13th century, he did not first seek the consent of his subjects. It was in the aftermath of their being subdued by his superior force that he did what Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century insisted all rulers should do if their rule is to escape repeated challenges and last for an appreciable length of time: turn might into right. Ethiopia, another veritable empire, is a multinational, multilingual, multicultural state whose members were not willing parties to their original incorporation into the polity. Whether you think of the Oromo or the Somali, many of their successor states within Ethiopia are, as I write this, still conducting anticolonial struggles against the Ethiopian state.

[15-lizards]

Imo there is not enough Valyria content out there so I would LOVE to see your thoughts/headcanons on what the geography, city, fashion, etc. looked like

okay this ones a little difficult because even though Valyria is clearly inspired by Rome, I don't like roman (aka greek) architecture for them it just doesn't really fit to me. Honestly its hard to assign any real life inspo because the existence of dragons would have had some major impact on the society as a whole, architecture included

However, if I had to pick a type to ascribe to Old Valyria, my first choice would be a twist on Hindu architecture. I am absolutely obsessed with the sheer amount of details on the buildings (especially the Meenaskshi Temple at the bottom, everyone please go look at more pictures of it it's gorgeous). It's incredibly complex but also tends to be very symmetrical, the styles perfected over hundreds and hundreds of years. I also really love the idea of the spaces being open and well lit, it fits well.

Another alternative is traditional Chinese architecture, with the added bonus of dragon motifs that are already there :D Another type of architecture with an intense focus on details, symmetry, and how the design of a space affects a person. Architecture is a reflection of where a society is in their development, and I find that this could be a good inspiration for Valyria, an advanced culture with the excess time and resources to build things like these.

Woof okay clothing is all over the place I need to brainstorm and tighten my focus on different inspos (also I wish I could draw well so I can blend these styles properly but alas...anyways we ball). The main thing is mediterranean cultures I know that much. The Iberian Peninsula, Rome, Greece, the Minoans, Malta, Cyprus, etc etc all the ancient clothing and traditional costumes from around the Mediterranean Sea. Valyria was in a warmer, damper climate, meaning lots of loose fabric that could let air through but wouldn't weigh you down. Also doubling as shields from the sun. You get the gist I use this type of clothing all the time.

Okay Random Cultural Things Time

Art and literature? honestly really important because while yes this was a conquering civilization, they needed their exploits to live on in wall frescoes and written epics and dramatic pantomimes. I think they were literate, and probably spread written Valyrian to all the colonies, so that they were easily assimilated. People particularly fond of their dragons had pictures of them made and statues sculpted so that they would live on after their death.

Sports and entertainment also pretty big as well. Valyrians were a highly competitive people To Me so I think that riding, swimming, wrestling, racing, and other games were popular with the people, even those in the higher classes. Also fuck it I bet they raced their dragons. A really tall amphitheater where rich men lost money as they watched dragons circle around the ring. Or fight in midair, if the dragon riders were prisoners or sentenced to death.

As for religion, the Valyrians worshipped the gods that gave them dragons, but also tolerated the other faiths of the places the conquered, just in order to ease tensions (and because they had no dragons so why would they worship dragon gods). I like the idea of Roman household gods, with small altars in every home. Statues of the gods of the home, along with any gods a particular family might favor, along with ancestor veneration and dragon veneration. Dragon skulls and dragon masks on the walls baby!

[eretzyisrael]

by Mark Oppenheimer

Black Classic also offers numerous books by the late Hunter College historian John Henrik Clarke (1915-1998), who shared Welsing’s homophobia. Clarke’s detractors often mention his antisemitism, but his homophobia is sometimes overlooked. On YouTube, you can see him cheered on as he tells an audience that Africans “had a healthy attitude toward things other people made unhealthy and made filthy and dirty.” Scornfully, he denies the possibility of gay Africans in antiquity. “Show me one case of sexual deviation before the coming of foreigners!” Elsewhere, Clarke, who blamed the “Jewish educational mafia” for multiculturalism, wrote an introduction to an edition of Michael Bradley’s 1978 book The Iceman Inheritance, which argues that white people are genetically predisposed to higher levels of racism and aggression than other groups, and speculates that Jews might be the ultimate “Neanderthal-Caucasoids.” 

He also wrote the foreword to Bradley’s 1992 work Chosen People from the Caucasus: Jewish Origins, Delusions, Deceptions and Historical Role in the Slave Trade, Genocide and Cultural Colonization. This last work argues that the people known as Jews today are descended from eighth-century converts to Judaism, having usurped the tradition from a group that had been practicing Judaism for more than two millennia; these late-arriving Jews, including today’s Ashkenazi Jews, have uniquely high levels of Neanderthal aggression, which has helped them dominate other groups.

In 2001, Clarke told an interviewer that “the European uses this religion”—Judaism—“as the handmaiden of his imperial desires. I strictly mean the Europeans who answer to the word Jew. He reads the word Jew into ancient history, where the word didn’t exist. When the European Jew didn’t exist.” In an interview you can find online, Clarke told an audience, “If Jews want to dominate something, it’s very easy to dominate us. So that’s what they do.”

The idea that “white” Jews, whether Ashkenazi, Sephardi (Iberian), or Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African), are somehow impostors or usurpers—with the “real” Jews coming from the Nile River Valley or other parts of Africa—is a poisonous myth deployed to subvert the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. It’s a lie presented as a given within a certain strain of Afrocentric thought, and embraced not only by Clarke but by the aforementioned “Dr. Ben”—Yosef A.A. ben-Jochannan—who, like Clarke, is well-represented in the offerings of Black Classic Press, which publishes 12 ben-Jochannan titles. These include We the Black Jews: Witness to the “White Jewish Race” Myth and African Origins of the Major “Western Religions.”

In 2015, shortly after ben-Jochannan’s death at 96, The New York Times reported that for decades he had deceived employers about his credentials, telling Cornell and other institutions that he had degrees from Cambridge, in England, and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. Neither school had a record of his enrollment. “ ‘People condemn me for not being an intellectual of the Ph.D. type,’ Mr. Ben-Jochannan once said, reacting to questions later raised about his résumé,” the Times wrote. “While he used the ‘white man’s credential’ to go ‘certain places,’ Mr. Ben-Jochannan said, he refused to ‘let the white man certify’ his work.”

As far as I can tell, Coates has nowhere discussed the allegations against ben-Jochannan, his longtime intellectual partner—and a writer who remains a source of revenue for the press. To the contrary, Coates has always spoken of ben-Jochannan with reverence. “In 1978, when we started publishing, three elders were inspirations and gave their support—John G. Jackson, John Henrik Clarke, and Yosef ben-Jochannan,” writes Coates on the Black Classic website. “His books have revolutionized the way Black people relate to Africa and the Nile Valley.” After ben-Jochannan’s death, Coates told the Times, “I consider Dr. Ben the greatest of the self-trained historians.” Ta-Nehisi told the Times that ben-Jochannan’s example “runs through everything I do.”

Along with Clarke and ben-Jochannan, one of the authors best represented in Black Classic’s offerings remains Tony Martin. The Jewish Onslaught may be gone from the website, but several of his other books are still there, including a pamphlet, published in 1998, containing the text of a lecture given in Trinidad called The Progress of the African Race Since Emancipation and Prospects for the Future. Although largely about the Afro-Caribbean experience, Martin takes time to explain that “[p]seudo-scientific racism had been around since at least the 4th or 5th century AD when the Jewish holy book, the Talmud, pioneered the notion that Africans were recipients of the curse of Ham.” The Talmud makes no connection between Noah’s son Ham and Africa—that is a later, mainly Christian tradition, seen in early church theologians like Eusebius of Caesarea (CE 260-340) and Bede (CE 673-735). 

But Martin, though a professor at Wellesley for many years, isn’t making a scholarly argument. He is making an indictment. This is also what he is doing when he writes:

“When President Clinton becomes president, he goes to Geneva and he bows down before the World Jewish Congress. When the African American woman Myrlie Evers-Williams became head of the NAACP the other day, she went straight to Geneva and bowed down before the World Jewish Congress.” This is fiction, of course—neither of them went to Geneva to genuflect before Jews—but hardly surprising coming from Martin, who elsewhere in his pamphlet calls the World Jewish Congress “a body organized on a racial or religious or whatever-the-Jews-are basis.”

One has to ask: Why is Coates selling this? 

[useless-catalanfacts]

In various cities of the Ancient Iberians (Ancient Iberians were the indigenous cultures that lived in the Eastern coast of the Iberian peninsula before they got conquered by the Roman empire), archaeologists have often found skulls perforated by a nail. All of them have been found in the cities located in what nowadays is the Northern half of Catalonia (Ancient Iberian cultures, though related to each other, varied a lot area to area).

These are believed to be the skulls of their enemies, who were captured and beheaded. The enemy’s heads were nailed to the city walls or above the entrance door to houses, together with their weapons. Most of these heads belonged to individuals of the male sex, though some are female and a few belonged to children.

The Ancient Iberian language hasn’t been deciphered and their contemporaries didn’t write much about them, thus many aspects of their culture aren’t known for certain. Archaeologists have the hypothesis that this practice could be related to the way Celts exhibited the heads and hands of their enemies as war trophies, or related to a belief present in the ancient Mediterranean according to which cutting someone’s head off stopped them from reaching immortality. The Gauls even passed down the beheaded heads of their enemies to their children, as a prized possession that brought prestige. It’s a possibility that Northern Iberians were in touch with this practice.

Photos from the Ancient Iberian site Ullastret (Comarques Gironines, Catalonia) posted on National Geographic. Information from Rovirà i Hortalà, 1998 and MAC Ullastret.

[blueiscoool]

Ancient Roman Forum Unearthed in Spain

A Spanish Farmer Long Believed a Roman Forum Once Stood on His Land. He’s Now Proven Right

Researchers have identified the Roman ruins in Ubrique as a large venue for public gathering.

In the late 1700s, Juan Vegazo, a farmer and amateur historian in Ubrique, in the southern Spanish province of Cadiz, had a grand theory: buried within the rock and dirt of a nearby hill lay the remains of an ancient Roman forum.

News from the excavations at Pompeii was reviving interest in Roman culture across Europe and inspired Vegazo to buy up the limestone hills and begin excavating. He uncovered inscriptions related to second century emperors, a name for the city, Ocuri, and laid the foundations for future archaeologists to uncover defensive walls, baths, and a mausoleum.

Still, Vegazo’s vision of the past remained incomplete. Until now. More than 300 years on, Vegazo has been vindicated by a team of archaeologists from the University of Granada. In coordination with the town of Ubrique, researchers have uncovered architectural elements in Ocuri that point to a large, public forum that would have served as place of gathering, socializing, and speechmaking. The finding infers that Ocuri was larger and more significant than previously believed.

Key to the discovery is a 50-foot-long wall that is believed to have enclosed the Roman forum as well as architectural elements of large and public buildings. Among these buildings is a large ceremonial site, as offered by the discovery of a monumental altar, column shafts and bases, and statue pedestals. Researchers believe the site supported religious practices related to water that mixed Roman and local customs.

“The excavations outline a space that is crucial for understanding the arrival and consolidation of the Romans in the southern Iberian Peninsula, as well as their hybridization with the communities that had already settled in the area,” the University of Granada’s Department of Prehistory and Archaeology said in a statement.

With its strategic hilltop position, it’s long been believed that a settlement pre-dated the Romans with researchers suggesting the absorption was both physical and cultural. Researchers now believe the site was inhabited until the end of the 4th century C.E. based on coins that were discovered—in particular, one marked with a Christogram, which is among the earliest forms of Christian iconography and was deployed by Constantine I in 312 C.E.

This continued presence in the southern reaches of Hispania, as the territory was known following its annexation in 19 C.E., was partly due to the trade advantages it offered, as it connected the coast to the interior parts of the province. Along with showing Ocuri’s size, the discovery of North African goods, including ceramics, suggests a strong and enduring (through the late 3rd century at least) economic links across the peninsula.

Aside from Roman discoveries, researchers also found evidence of medieval defensive structures.

By Richard Whiddington.

[ashoss]

Child of Venus (or alternatively a legacy) Tim Drake. 

First really quickly going to run down some very basic history quickly. 

Roman Venus comes from the Greek Aphrodite, who comes from the Western Semitic goddess Astarte, who is known by the ancient Mesopotamian as Ishtar and earlier Ianna. 

This is an extreme overview of thousands of years of history, but it conveys my point. I want to explore all of these aspects quickly before I get into my thoughts on how this connects. (Also, like an extreme basic rundown of things that people might not know)

Ianna - is the goddess of love and war (along with several other fields) but is also heavily associated with divine law and political power. An interesting fact is that she was actually a three-form goddess. She went from a fairly localised deity to one of the most venerated deities across Mesopomeia. When the Assyrians took over, she became the highest deity, even above their national ones. She was so popular and essential that she is alluded to in Hebrew text. She didn’t experience a proper decline until the period between the 1st century CE and the sixth century CE when Christianity became widespread. She was in more myths than any other Sumerian deity.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna 

Astarte - is the goddess of these associated combinations: war, royal power, healing, and hunting (and several others). The travels, trade, and colonisation of the people would end with her being worshipped and an accepted deity in many places, from Egypt to the Iberian peninsula. She is considered to be the equivalent of Isis in some schools of thought. Her worship would land in Cyprus, where she could have merged with a local goddess and would slowly go to mainland Greece during the late Mycenean era or the following post-Broze age collapse. In the Greek classical period, she was occasionally equated with Aphrodite through (what a great many Polythetsic cultures did) the practice of synchronising deities.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astarte

Aphrodite - is the goddess of love, beauty, and passion (along with the others everyone knows). She is one of the twelve Olympians and is one of the most widely celebrated and worshipped deities in the Hellenic world. Some of her other epithets were Eleemon (the merciful) and Enoplios (armed). She was called Tymborychos (gravedigger) along with the previously discussed Areia (the warlike) in one of her darker, more violent natures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphrodite# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphrodite_Areia

Venus - is the goddess of desire, prosperity, and victory. She is the ancestor of the Roman people through her son, and Julius Ceaser claimed to have been her ancestor. A couple of the epithets I want to highlight for a moment are Fleix (lucky), Genetrix (the mother), Physica Pompeiana (Pompeii’s protective goddess), Verticordia (charger of hearts), and Victrix (victorious) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_(mythology)

Okay, now let's move on to my thoughts because this consumed my brain so much that I needed to grab my computer and write it down. 

The Thoughts! 

I’ll start with the child of Venus and then do the legacy version. 

Janet and Venus. Imagine if, on one of the important archaeology trips, Janet comes across something important to Venus. It could be anything, whether it be the start of new ruins of a worship spot or a statue. Venus appreciates Janet's respect towards the findings and wants to know more about Janet. (There is also the fact that there is an extreme difference between the number of men and women in archaeology, especially field archaeology.) The two of them share a conversation where Janet shows interest in the history of Venus, and Venus herself drops the idea that the history behind Venus and the goddesses that precede her is also enjoyable. It was a test. Janet takes this information, wanting to have another conversation with the woman and learns as much as possible. Realising that she can do more field research, she sets it up. Venus appreciates this, and he wonders whether Tim is just the kid of Janet and Venus or if he has a three-parent setup. Tim exists. 

Did Venus more or less give Janet a quest? Yes. Does Janet regret it? No. It is a very cute and tragic set-up because to be favoured by the gods is to be doomed by them. You could change up their death a bit, too. To match the tragedy vibe. 

Tim grows up learning all about his parent's work. It may not have been his favourite, but he listened and learned. Tim, sent to boarding schools and in the comics, always saw school as a necessity but something secondary—Tim, who was often separate from his parents. What if when Dick Grayson’s parents died (Monster attack?), his parents realised just how dangerous the world is, and they sent him to different boarding schools to try and keep him safe. It could also explain some of Jack’s attitude. Knowing that Tim isn’t truely his. Knowing the reality that fate could hand his son. Explain why he often sits back to parenting, knowing that his son could die in tragedy young, but also why he clings sometimes. Why will he hammer down on parenting when he realises that he can’t protect his kid and his kid could die? 

Now onto Tim. Tim loves his city so much. Tim goes back to Gotham even when his whole family moves. Tim would do anything for Gotham. That is Passion and Love. That is dedication. Tim, who becomes Robin. Who must go through a much longer trail and training before becoming Robin properly? He who trained under Shiva, who Shiva sees potential for. He who chooses an unconventional weapon. One that does not quickly kill but requires skill and ability to use. (He is fighting a war in Gotham but also loves Gotham. He hurts and helps. He causes pain, and he saves. He brings himself to ruin to help his loved ones in his beloved city and make something better for the world he lives in.) 

Tim finds himself victorious most of the time but sometimes has to rely a bit on luck. He is Robin, a protector of Gotham. Tim, by the way of being Robin, is trying to create a better Gotham. Tim is the one who created the Batfamily as we know it. He often gets people to work together that do not work together very well. 

He is also well-travelled because he is Robin and a hero in general. He has been on multiple teams and has worked alone, and despite seeing what the world (the universe) has to offer, he is still from Gotham and will belong to Gotham. 

But tragedy follows him, and he ends up in front of the graves of his loved ones more often than not. His parents, his friends, and those he feels he has failed. Even with the best of intentions, people still die and leave, and generally, being Robin creates a tragedy. 

Tim being the first Roman in the family could be very alienating and make him feel like he has to prove himself, but also the idea that he would have to work harder to prove he can fight and be here, and people still underestimate him? Venus may have been significant, but people have inherent biases. No one would assume a child of Venus would be a skilled warrior despite the history of war. However, the opposite is how people would think he only got this far because of how important of a goddess his mother is. That he didn’t have to put in the hard work because he wasn’t expected to. 

I have many more thoughts, but they generally vibe without a coherent statement. If I find words for them, I’ll send another annon. 

~~~

The Legacy idea

One of the Drakes is a child of Venus who is doing archaeology because it is part of the quest their mother sent them on. They are constantly travelling because staying in one place could have put their son in even more danger. If you still wanted Tim to be tied to Athena, you could have the other parent be a child or a legacy of Athena. 

Annon AK

(btw if you guys are interested in aphrodite lore, i really enjoyed Overly Sarcastic Production’s video on her! theyve also done one on Dionysus, Hermes and Hades/Persephone - plus a ton of other myths and classics :))

Honestly i am so in love with aphrodite/venus child tim (no pun intended). while yes athena fits him in terms of intellect and wit- tim is more so defined by his love- for his friends, family, gotham itself. (and thank you @pooky-chan for telling me abt aphrodite tim, i feel like his love is such an underused part of his character.)

i think actually going into janet and jack's relationship with venus is super interesting! i hadn't really thought about how their birth/godly parent would effect any of their family dynamic at all.

tbh everything youve said is really great! i definitely couldn't have gone in that much detail for his background. thank you for sharing :D

[jackredfieldwasmyjacob]

they just discovered an alphabet in the el turuñuelo tartessic site !!!!! this is huge !!!!!!

the tartessic culture is the oldest in the iberian peninsula, located in the southwestern corner of the peninsula and dated to around the 9th century BCE to the 5th/4th century BCE. in this map you can see in the brightest red the core of the culture, in darker red the dispersion to the north in later centuries, and in light red its cultural sphere, which spanned almost half of the peninsula.

if you are interested in the culture, i have a post about them.

el turuñuelo is an archaeological site located in guareña (guadajoz), in the northernmost point of the tartessos culture. it is with no doubt the singlemost important tartessic archaeological site, and i would even go on to say it is the biggest archaeological discovery of this century - at least in europe.

it was discovered in 2015, and it is a sanctuary or some sort of temple complex, which at first made the news because of its incredible state of preservation: a complete set of stairs and the remains of a horse hecatomb with at least 17 complete bodies were found in 2017.

it already was the most important tartessic archaeological site just because of that (there are very few tartessic sites and most of them are not very well preserved), but after the excavations halted during covid, these last few years they returned to the site and they have made amazing discoveries. the most well-known and televised one, that made it to the news and i got to see when they set up an exposition about them last summer, are the faces of el turuñuelo in 2023, the first ever representation of tartessians by tartessians. i made a post about them, if you are interested.

this year they not only found a large collection of tartessic ceramic - which lets us know that the temple was also an artisan and probably commercial center as well, as it was usual in ancient religious centers - but just a few days ago they discovered a slate plaque with human figures, that seem to be a sort of trial drawings made by some artisan

if they seem familiar, that's because it is in one of these plaques where the alphabet has been able to be traced down, being able to be confirmed only today (11/06/2024). this is only the third southwestern paleohispanic alphabet ever founded - an alphabet derived from the phoenician one - and the most recent. it is also distinct from the other two previously discovered ones, seeing some sort of dialectalism in the way this alphabet (or set of alphabets) worked. more importantly, it is the first one to note a tartessic language, which we know was not indoeuropean in nature and also distinct from the iberian languages of the mediterranean coast. this was a distinct language or languages.

this is very exciting not only because we have a tartessic alphabet, but also because we know from greek authors like strabo that tartessians were known to be scholars that had large libraries with all sorts of knowledge of the past. we also know that the greeks interacted with the tartessians. so. it is possible that, if el turuñuelo had one of these archives that strabo talked about, that more writting can be salvaged and not only that, we could find a bilingual text in tartessian and greek that could act as a rosetta stone to finally descipher tartessian, the oldest known language in the iberian peninsula.

i cannot wait to see what el turuñuelo brings us next, it's so very exciting !!!!!!!