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“I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (via philosophybits)
(via philosophybits)
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On this day, 30 May 1969, a workers’ uprising began in Curaçao, a Caribbean island and part of the Dutch empire, which brought down the government. A mass strike was underway, and widespread rioting broke out against low pay and discrimination against the black population. The rebellion was a key turning point in Curaçao’s history. More information in this article about a recent general strike: https://libcom.org/blog/general-strike-starting-refinery-workers-caribbean-island-curacao-awaiting-new-masters-chin https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1134902010028281/?type=3
Did children build the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna? -
The answer is yes; yes they did.
Casual reminder that Akhenaten is a dick
Bringing this back to remind everyone that we don’t stan Akhenaten in this house.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought most people back then didn’t expect to live past their early 20’s. They were all children; even the pharaohs when they took charge. It’s Lord of the Flies: Egypt Edition.
No, that’s a common misconception.
Most people in Egypt would live well into their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond, it’s just that there was a higher chance of them not getting as old as we do because they’ve not got the same medical care. Ramesses II died in his 90s. Most of Ramesses II’s children were in their 60s and 70s when they came to power. You see tombs of common folk who died in their 40s from cancer, or mummies of 50 year olds who died of an infection after a fall. Hatshepsut died from skin cancer aged 50, her successor died at 56. We’ve got tomb biographies and wisdom texts that talk about going grey and getting wrinkles, and medical texts that have ‘cures’ for greying hair and wrinkles. If they’re only living to around 25 then they’re not going to need those, yet they exist for a reason.
Yep. I can confirm this was the same in the rest of the Ancient Near East as well.
The misconception is based on average life expectancy. Nowadays, if you hear a country has an average life expectancy of 75, you would assume - quite correctly - that the average person will live to around 75. Naturally, if you hear that an ancient civilisation had an average life expectancy of 25, you would assume the same thing - but this time, you would be wrong.
Let’s take two imaginary populations as an example. In the first, everyone dies at the age of 25, meaning that the average life expectancy is obviously 25. In the second, half the people die as newborns, and the other half die at the age of 50. This population also has an average life expectancy of 25. It’s this second population, not the first, which is closer to the reality of the ancient world.
Demographic data from Hittite Anatolia shows this quite well. A land donation tablet* from the Middle Hittite period (approx. 15th century BC) gives us the members of the household of a man called Pappa: among them are Pappa, two other men, four women, one boy, two baby (breastfed) boys, three baby girls, and an elderly man. That’s five babies for four women - and only one older boy. Other land donation tablets paint a similar picture: on average, there is one (or more) breastfed baby for each grown woman, but the number of babies vastly exceeds the number of children. This leaves us with a grim conclusion. More than half of all Hittites, in this time and place, died in infancy.
Once someone had survived infancy, however, their chances of living to an old age were quite good. The Hittite king Ḫattušili lived to around 70 despite a chronic illness; his sister Maššanauzzi was still alive at over 50; his wife Puduḫepa may have lived to 90. The same goes for Mesopotamia, where Adad-Guppi, mother of king Nabonidus, died at the age of 102. This wasn’t just the case for royalty, either:
Conventional wisdom in ancient Mesopotamia had it that 40 years was a human’s prime, 60 was the age of full maturity; dying at 50 meant a short life and at 70 a long one. Eighty years was old age; 90 extreme old age; and the longest life span possible for humans had been set by the gods after the flood at 120 years.
Scurlock, JoAnn, Anderson, Burton R., Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine. Ancient Sources, Translations, and Modern Medical Analyses, University of Illinois Press, 2005, p. 24.
So to go back to the original article, no, a cemetery of children and teenagers is not normal. It’s the sign that something is tragically wrong with the way these children are being treated.
*Source: Wilhelm, Gernot, “Demographic Data from Hittite Land Donation Tablets”, in: F. Pecchioli Daddi, G. Torri, C. Corti (eds.), Central-North Anatolia in the Hittite Period. New Perspectives in Light of Recent Research (Studia Asiana 5), Roma: Herder, 2009, 223-233.
And this explains beautifully the thing I was too busy eating toast to type properly! Thank you!
(via thatlittleegyptologist)
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Between Utopia and Terror • Commune -
By the Autumn of 1918, it had become clear that Germany was losing the World War. In a last ditch effort, the German High Command prepared a final offensive. Unwilling to continue risking their lives for a losing cause, sailors in Kiel mutinied in early November. The uprising spread like wildfire, igniting the German Revolution. In the German state of Bavaria, after a long struggle, workers declared a Council Republic, under the leadership of communists and anarchists. The Bavarian Soviet Republic did not last long, but it was one of the highest peaks in the wave of revolutions that followed the World War. In the end, all of the forces of the old Europe, Social Democracy, pre-fascist freikorps, and the military, entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter. In the suppression of the Council Republic, the nucleus of German fascism was developed.
On November 7, 1918, the Bavarian workers, farmers, and soldiers expelled King Ludwig III, thereby ending the 738-year-old reign of the Wittelsbach Dynasty over Bavaria. That day, sixty thousand people gathered at Munich’s Theresienwiese for a demonstration against the war. At the rally, two factions of Social Democracy faced each other.
In opposition to the complacency of Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) towards the First World War, the left wing of the party had split from the majority, forming the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). The SPD’s Erhard Auer called for peace and reforms, including the eight-hour day. Kurt Eisner, a journalist and leading figure in the USPD, on the other hand, argued that only revolution could bring a lasting peace, that the king and emperor must be deposed in favor of a people’s democracy, and that extensive social reforms were only possible as part of the march towards socialism. Anarchists were also among the crowd, including the famous author Erich Mühsam, one of the main protagonists of the revolutionary left in Munich at the time. As the revolution unfolded, the tension between these three poles defined much of the drama.
(Source: communemag.com, via )