spencermcdaniel.bsky.social
Studies ancient Greek cultural and social history, BA history and classical studies @IUBloomington, MA @BrandeisCLAS, she/her.
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Is it just me or does that image look very obviously AI-generated?
Also, if they want historical accuracy, there should be greater variation in the armor and helmets and the shields should be painted with unique designs (since each soldier decorated his own shield).
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That being said, I do not think that accessibility is a good excuse for not carefully distinguishing between what is supported by evidence and what is speculation. If anything, accessibility *requires* that we communicate such distinctions clearly.
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It's fine. I only pointed it out because I personally made the same mistake of attributing the seven-day week to the Babylonians (based, I think, on what I read on Wikipedia or someplace) in a blog post I made eight years ago.
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There is no compelling evidence, however, that the Romans got the seven-day week with days named after the seven planets from the Babylonians. Its origins are murky. Peter Gainsford has a detailed blog post on this subject if you want to read more.
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kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2024/04/week...
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The claim that the seven-day week originates with the Babylonians is an assumption based on the fact that the days of the week are named after the seven planets in Hellenistic astrology, which drew heavily on earlier Babylonian astrology.
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The earliest extant reference to a day with one of the modern weekday names (Saturday) occurs in the Roman poet Tibullus (fl. c. 55 – c. 19 BCE). Two graffiti from Pompeii (one in Latin, the other in Greek), which date no later than 79 CE, list the names of the days of the week in order.
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The image's claim about the origin of our days of the week is not supported by evidence. Scholars actually don't know where the days of the week originate from; we only know that the names of the days we know are first attested in Roman Italy in the late first century BCE.
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The best part is that the hat he's wearing is historically accurate headgear for a fourteenth-century Italian cardinal. The red wide-brimmed cardinal hat is known as a galero and was part of the official regalia for cardinals from the mid-thirteenth century until Pope Paul IV abolished it in 1969.
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Unfortunately, they did mostly the latter!
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Honestly, I bet the only thing Trump knows about 'Les Misérables' is that it's about white people in the nineteenth century yearning for freedom from oppression and his mind equates that with his base yearning for "freedom" from the "oppression" of liberal wokeness.
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The concept of Hell also did not exist in Judahite/Judean religion during the period of the composition of the Torah. It only developed later out of the apocalyptic movement of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods.
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Ironically, this commandment itself is probably the reason why Jews (and, as a result, Christians) stopped using the name Yahweh. As a pious practice to avoid even the possibility of *accidentally* taking Yahweh's name in vain, it gradually became taboo to even speak the name aloud at all.
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Yes, that's absolutely an extended meaning of the commandment. The reason why the commandment says "the name of Yahweh" is because it was written at a time when people still regularly used the name Yahweh for God and swore oaths by it.
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That being said, a pretty clear implication of this is certainly that those who claim to represent Yahweh and have either explicitly or implicitly sworn to serve him must do so faithfully without misrepresenting his intentions or presenting their own agendas as his.
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The commandment in Exodus 20:7 and Deuteronomy 5:11 arguably *implies* this, but the consensus of critical scholars is that the more direct, original meaning of it was about keeping one's oaths. It means: Don't swear an oath in the name of Yahweh that you will do something and then not do it.
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Thus, unless a person swears an oath in which they say "I swear by Yahweh that I will. . ." and then doesn't do what they promised to do, then they haven't actually "taken the Lord's name in vain" in the original Biblical sense.
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The consensus among critical Biblical scholars is that the original meaning of the commandment in Exodus 20:7 and Deuteronomy 5:11 was to forbid a person from swearing an oath by the name Yahweh (the proper name of the God of Israel) that they did not intend to follow through with.
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Pharaoh Unas in his tomb inscription:
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It's like this:
Fictional horror pharaoh's tomb inscription: "Whoever disturbs the pharaoh's rest will suffer a terrible curse."
Audiences: Woooo spooky!!!
Meanwhile, a real, historical pharaoh's tomb inscription:
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Somehow it still boggles my mind how completely out of touch Elon is with the thought processes of any normal human being.
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I'm currently writing a novel that is partly based on the obscure legend told by Julian, Photios, and several scholiasts about the foundation of the temple of the Mother of the Gods in the Athenian agora, although I expand on it quite a bit and incorporate a lot of themes with contemporary salience.
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It has so many layers!
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Caesar may not have said anything at all when he crossed the Rubicon, but, if he did, it is more likely that he said it in Greek as Plutarch claims, given the phrase's Greek origin.
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As I discuss in the article, "Iacta alea est" is a Latin translation of the Greek phrase "ἀνερρίφθω κύβος," which occurs in a play by Menandros. Plutarch, who records the story about Caesar, specifically says that Caesar said the phrase in the original Greek.
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Julius Caesar probably didn't really say "Alea iacta est" when he crossed the Rubicon, but fascist influencer Ashley St. Clair really did use it when she announced that she had given birth to wannabe imperator mundi Elon Musk's thirteenth child.
talesoftimesforgotten.com/2024/05/08/d...