#bronze era

[episkey-rpg]

Kieran Wilson

Kieran Wilson is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. He is known to be Strong-Willed, Ambitious, Obsessive, Toxic, and Manipulative. He was sorted into Slytherin House at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

SHORT BIO: Kieran is a typical Alpha male. He's popular and is a straight-A student. He is obsessive and controlling when it comes to people he loves, and will do whatever it takes to make sure he keeps them.

Kieran’s face claim is Tom Blyth (younger) and Matt Bomer (older). This role has been closed.

[indo-europeans]

The Hittite Plague is described as the first known record of biological warfare, dating back ~3500 years.

Before and during World War II, it was developed as one of seven standardized biological weapons by Americans in cooperation with Germans. 

The US biological warfare program supposedly “ended” barely fifty years ago: 1969. But in actuality, the program continued, just under more obscure names like “Project 112″

[thebibliosphere]

Sat too long in my feelings about the Gotham Knights video game Jason Todd going to therapy and trying to engage with his siblings from a place of healing and hurt myself, so now I'm inflicting this on all of you, but:

Do you ever think about how Jason only ever gets to experience Dick as an extension of the breakdown of Dick and Bruce's relationship at that time? Granted, depending on the comic era, Dick maybe doesn't show up as much as he should, or Jason acts like an antagonistic little shit, but overall, Dick's falling out with Bruce overshadows all of it.

And, like, yeah, it's funny to joke that only Jason knows that Dick went through a shitbag teenage phase and that no one ever believes him. (Gaslight, Gate Keep, Gotham ✌) And Jason is irate about it because how can they not see through what is clearly The World's Best Big Brother Act? How can no one else see it's fake?

(Unless it's not fake, and Jason just wasn't worth loving... No, fuck off, he doesn't care, he doesn't. Leave him alone.)

But at the same time, what if Jason's the only one who realizes it's a trauma response?

What if Jason's in the middle of a therapy session or reading one of the self-help books we see him ordering, and he just has to take a moment to breathe because, of course, it's a fucking trauma response. Of course, it is.

Dick's not pretending to be anything. He was, in fact, so severely affected by Jason's death that he over-corrected and now refuses to let himself be anything other than the Perfect Big Brother. Because he can't. Because when he's not perfect, when he's not there for them, they die.

Suddenly the golden retriever's cheerfulness is less grating and more worrying. Dick's need for perfection is less an annoying personality trait to compete with and more an exhausted cry for help that no one else seems to see. Not even Dick.

Because Jason realizes now that he might have never managed to live up to the Golden Boy mantle, but Dick will never get to put it down, either. Because he can't let himself. Because bad shit happens when he does.

So what if that's what he hopes Dick reads between the lines in the email he sends him in GK?

What if, by saying, "Hey, I realize now trying to hold myself to your standards was damaging my relationship with you, but I need you to know it wasn't your fault," was also Jason saying, "Hey, this shit isn't healthy are you fucking okay?"

[avelera]

thesis about the sea peoples you say? may i request an infodump about the sea peoples?

Heya!

So, basically in college (undergraduate) I got really obsessed with the questions around the Collapse of the Aegean Bronze Age, mostly because I wanted to set my big Magnum Opus historical fiction novel in that time, and the deeper I dug into the rabbit hole the more it appeared that no one, absolutely no one, actually knows why the civilizations around the Mediterranean all fell from a state of pretty sophisticated internationally-trading civilizations to literal Dark Ages (all except for Egypt which was substantially weakened and never really recovered), all at once around 1200-1100 BCE.

The Sea Peoples are the names of the only contemporary (Egyptian) account we have that names who might have been responsible if this collapse was due to an invasion. It's a popular theory because a viking-style invasion is a much sexier reason for a civilization to collapse so we all gather around it like moths to flame. But the thing is, there's a lot of contradictory evidence for and against and shading that hypothesis.

Suffice to say, literally no actually knows what happened and almost every answer comes up, "Some combination of these things, probably?"

But what makes the Collapse even more interesting from a modern perspective is that if there was a historical Trojan War (and I think there was) as fictionalized in the Iliad and the Odyssey (and Song of Achilles, for the Tumbrlistas), then it would have taken place within a generation of the entire civilization that launched the Trojan War crumbling to dust.

So like, if you're Telemachus, your dad Odysseus fights in the Trojan War, some even manage to get home, and then like... everything goes to shit. Catastrophically. And doesn't recover for 400 years.

Seriously, they lost the written word, like how to actually write things down and read them and it took 400 years to get it back. That's how fucked shit got during the Collapse of the Bronze Age.

So my thesis was asking: what if these two things were related? What if the Trojan War either led to the Collapse or it was part of the Collapse or it was a result of the Collapse? Because the timeline is so unknown and muddled that it really could be any of those and again, that's if the Trojan War isn't entirely fictional (which I don't think it is, but many academics disagree, it used to be a whole thing up until Schliemann dug it up, and many doubted it was ever a historical event even after that.)

Ok, so at the risk of writing 75 pages on this again, let me just say:

My conclusion (more of a hypothesis proposal ultimately since there are so many gaps in our knowledge) was that the Trojan War took place before the Collapse of the Bronze Age. But, it might have been launched in response to a wider breakdown in trades routes and resources, causing the Greeks to launch the campaign basically as a bid to replenish their own coffers because they were getting squeezed by what they didn't know was the first rumblings of a global domino effect.

Therefore, since taking out Troy didn't solve those larger trends and forces, they all went home and then got slammed by the REAL problem, which was all the people who had been displaced from further away by this rolling drought or invasion or whatever that was disrupting these delicate international trade routes.

But the Greeks might have been part of the Sea Peoples too! Our only record of the Sea Peoples is from the Egyptians in a highly propagandistic text which makes them sound like this big fearsome foe but that might have been because saying, "We slaughtered a bunch of desperate refugees at our border who were looking for shelter," didn't sound as cool. If the Greeks (or Achaeans or Ahhiyawa) got swept up in this slow-rolling collapse/displacement of people, then they absolutely could have been among those refugees who crashed against the shores of Egypt.

A lot of my evidence was based on looking at how Troy was sacked (it was stripped literally down the nails and there was a lot of evidence of a long-term siege, like what we read about in the Iliad) vs. how Mycenae (Agamemnon's city) or Pylos (King Nestor's city) was sacked, where they were burned and stuff was stolen but they weren't stripped, it looks more like a standard looting hit-and-run type thing. Which led me to believe that it was different turmoil that rocked Mycenae and Pylos than what led to the sacking of Troy, despite the fact these things happened within about 20 years of each other. (Helen being a made-up reason for a resource-driven war would only be the oldest trick in the book, as far as propaganda goes, after all.)

But really, the craziest detail I'll leave you with is: we just don't know! And then it gets weirder. Because the Hittites fell at the same time so the Hittites scholars say, "Nah, the Sea Peoples weren't Hittites, they were probably Greeks." And the GREEK scholars say, "It wasn't us, it was probably the Hittites or someone else. " and the EGYPTIAN scholars say, "Yeah it was someone north of Egypt, maybe the Hittites or the Greeks." and the LEVANT scholars say, "It wasn't from the Levant, we know what was going on there, it has to be from somewhere else."

Literally every single possible source of the Sea Peoples has the scholars who specialize in that location saying it's not them and it must be the guy next door.

It's maddening!

And then there's a big ol' gap around Bulgaria and the Black Sea because, oh yeah, the Soviet Union forbade archaeology in those areas to quash any local pride so those places that were behind the Iron Curtain are decades behind on scholarship that would allow them to say, "Oh hey, it was actually us! Yeah, the invaders came from Bulgaria and got pushed down by a famine." or something to that effect.

We also have some histories from the time saying that the Sons of Heracles returned not long after the Trojan War to lay Greece to waste! And it's really evocative and sounds like it fits what we've got of all these burned cities that happened right after Troy fell! Except that's in doubt now too!

The latest theory is that it was climate change that led to a massive drought. You can read about it in the latest and most popular book on the subject, 1177 BCE which I highly recommend because if it had existed when I wrote my thesis, I wouldn't have had to write it.

But I disagree with the conclusion! Or rather, I'm skeptical. Because very decade, the problems of the day have been hypothesized as being the cause of the Collapse. Like, in the 60s, there was a theory that maybe it was internal strife around a labor strike, like the French Revolution. And y'know when there's a world war, they think it's an invasion. And there was a theory that it was 'cuz of an earthquake (I think that one is nonsense, Mediterranean civilizations famously bounce back quickly from earthquakes.) And now that climate change is on our mind, I'm a little weary to see that it's the new theory because it feels way too much like we're just projecting our problems onto this giant question mark.

Was climate an aspect! I think so! I think it might have contributed to the break down in trade routes that made everyone in the Mediterranean really stressed out and hostile and warlike and led to a lot of displacement. I'm not sure if it's the only reason though and I think the book just kinda reiterates everyone else saying, "I think it was this but in the end, we just don't know, and it was probably a lot of things." which we've known for ages so it's just repeating all the same conclusions. *sigh*

... Like I said, I wrote my thesis on this so yeah, I could go on for a while lol.

[scurviesdisneyblog]

𝙳𝚒𝚜𝚗𝚎𝚢 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚌𝚎𝚙𝚝 𝚊𝚛𝚝Ｉᴛʜᴇ ʙʀᴏɴᴢᴇ [ᴅᴀʀᴋ] ᴀɢᴇ (1970 - 1988)

[retrodisneydaily]

do you love the colours of fall?

(requested by anonymous)

[disney-is-mylife]

I'm ONLY counting the films from the Walt Disney Animation Studios line-up between 1967 (after The Jungle Book) and 1989 (before The Little Mermaid). There's some debate on what this era of Disney animation is called, so I went with both titles I tend to hear a lot. I feel like this poll requires a fairly niche audience since a lot of these are (sadly) forgotten.

[wosona]

London date 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩

[titsthedamnseason]

eras tour lookbook: my favorites edition

[yebreed]

Serpentine Drum Stand From The Warring States Period

Another surrealist masterpiece. Artifacts like this make Warring States one of my favorite eras.)

The stand is conceived for the Jian type drum (建鼓), a double-headed drum with a pole, fixed on this base. The drum was skewered on a pole, just like an olive on a toothpick:

The top of the pole was often ornate with fluttering feathers (羽葆), the structure itself being reminiscent of the archetypal Axis Mundi and the World Tree. The motif of ascent to the heavenly realms thanks to drumming is characteristic of shaman beliefs.

Han dynasty relief depicting the Ascension to Heavens. A pole with a two-headed Jian drum is portrayed in a shamanic manner, as the World Axis, piercing the realms. Jiangsu Normal University Museum (江蘇師範大學博物館).

The slot is surrounded by sixteen principal serpentine beings with progressing in fractal minor ones. They were inlaid with now lost turquoise.

Although intricate, the base is symmetrical. Four rings along the contour were used as carrying handles. The weight of the device is impressive: more than 192 kg. Unearthed in 1978 from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (Leigudun Tomb No.1 ), Suizhou, Hubei. On display in Hubei Provincial Museum (湖北省博物館).

Photo: ©湖北省博物馆藏

[episkey-rpg]

William "Bill" Weasley

Bill is the son of Arthur Weasley Sr. and Molly Weasley. He is known to be Active, Outgoing, Adventurous, Clever, Strategic, and Curious. He was sorted into Gryffindor House at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

SHORT BIO: William Weasley is the oldest of the Weasley pack of children, having already graduated by the time Harry Potter started attending school. He was Gryffindor Prefect and Head Boy for passing all twelve OWL exams. After graduating he began work immediately as a Curse Breaker for Gringotts Bank.

Bill’s face claim is Domhnall Gleeson. This role has been closed.

[indo-europeans]

Anitta text, 17th century BCE

is the oldest known text in Hittite, as well as an indo european language altogether. Anitta’s father Pithana conquered the city of Kanesh or Nesha and Anitta eventually conquered Hattusa

The Bronze Age civilizations “mysteriously” declined within a few centuries 

[serpentface]

Palo and Tigran standing casually in place to provide an outfit reference.

They are wearing the most typical day to day clothing for Galenii monks. This consists of three main parts:

-A simple, ankle-length sleeveless robe (white in initiate monks and black in the fully initiated). -A dark woolen cloak, which doubles as a blanket. This cloak is the foundational item of clothing throughout much of Imperial Wardin as a whole, and worn by all social classes. They tend to be cut shorter and highly decorative in the upper classes, serving only the practical purpose of shielding the arms from the sun. Poor laborers may wear only the cloak and a loincloth and nothing else. In the case of Galenii monks, it is standardized, simple, and dark blue-gray. -The sash. This is a very long scarf that is the primary visual signifier of a Galenii monk. Its open ends drape down the front side of the body and are tied at the chest. It is slung over the shoulders and hangs in a loop around the back. These sashes are dyed an expensive royal blue, indicating the significance and relative esteemed status of this religious order.

Additional elements:

-The sign of the horns: a small iron pin used to fasten the cloak. This is the symbol of the Lunar Face Of God (the specific aspect to which the Galenii are devoted, which is primarily associated with fertility and the cycles of sacrifice and rebirth). This is very common among monks but not standardized wear. Galenii priests wear the sign of the triple horns (though more commonly as an amulet).

-Ear piercings: Galenii monks and priests wear thick earrings of dark meteoric iron and stretch their earlobes. One is added to each ear for each year of the initiatory process. Palo is a year in, and Tigran is fully initiated and has five bands per ear. Body modification is exceptionally rare in Imperial Wardi culture, largely in relation to taboos surrounding body integrity. The exception here is done with great significance and care- these earrings can be made only with true meteoric iron, considered to be the blood of God Itself. Permanently marking their bodies with this metal signifies this priesthood's integral connection to maintaining the continual cycle of sacrifice/rebirth that is believed to keep God's domain stable, and binds them to this role.

-Sandals: usually very simple in construction. Monks are often expected to go barefoot, but the cities are quite dirty so most prefer to avoid this if possible.

-Ceremonial dagger: a sign of a fully initiated monk. It is curved and its sheath is decorated with a tuft of lion's mane (a signal of the Galenii order's close connection to the Odonii order). Most of its uses are ceremonial, but it will be periodically used to perform animal sacrifices. A smaller razor blade is kept in the home for personal bloodletting.

-Hair: Fully initiated monks shave their heads, while those in the process of initiation have relative freedom with hair dressing. Palo is wearing his hair in a single braid tucked around the front. Broadly speaking, braiding the hair is associated with female beauty standards throughout much of Imperial Wardin (though generally in two braids). There is no cultural convention Against men doing so, but it is regarded as mildly effeminate (particularly in the south and southeast).

-Lore Friendly Sunglasses: Palo has photosensitive epilepsy. No effective treatments for epilepsy exist in the setting (most 'treatments' in Imperial Wardin are alchemical in nature, ie: ambiguously helpful at best or literal poison at worst), but understanding of the Nature of epilepsy as a neurological disorder is relatively accurate, and the concept of photosensitivity is loosely understood (though not with great accuracy, it's assumed to be caused by light in General). Palo had this pair of (VERY expensive) sunglasses commissioned as a youth, which Do slightly reduce the frequency of his seizures. Devastatingly stylish as they may be, his glasses do not offer much visual clarity so he only wears them in bright conditions.

[taomubiji]

Zhu Jiuyin in the Qinling Sacred Tree Comic (x)

[tswiftupdatess]

Tonight's evermore dress!