The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her
Empress-consort rather than empress-regnant, I’m afraid. She was Julia Domna, wife of emperor Septimus Severus and accompanying him on his attempt to bring the north of Britain under his control
That said, there absolutely were empresses-regnant of the Byzantine empire, and there’s no reason to consider that a separate entity. Irene Sarantapechaena and about four or five others absolutely were ruling Roman empresses
I had to look that up, it’s just too good to pass.
(Cassius Dio, contemporary historian) tells us that the empress teased her companion (the wife of Argentocoxos, a Caledonian chief) by saying that Caledonian women indulge in a sexual free-for-all, sharing their beds with different men while making no attempt to conceal their adultery. To a respectable aristocratic lady like Julia, such brazen promiscuity would indeed have seemed worthy of comment. We then see the wife of Argentocoxos swiftly responding with what Dio calls ‘a witty remark’ of her own:
“We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.”
A bit further below, however
The consensus view among present-day historians is that he simply invented the speech quoted above.
Sauce - https://senchus.wordpress.com/2019/08/14/julia-and-the-caledonian-women/
We have proof that kids have never paid attention in school. For example, in Novgorod around 1250 A.D. a six year old boy named Onfim (later called Anthemius of Novgorod) was supposedly practicing his writing and basic arithmetic. Much of what archeologists have found were doodles of him being a heroic knight . These were buried in a waste pile, where they were rediscovered by archeologists. They are a treasured part of Slavic history and there is now a statue of him in his hometown.
These don’t look too dissimilar to things I’d doodle when I was 6. Interesting how kids always kinda draw the same.
A dude had heard about some other kind of god, and so he randomly looked up at the sky and basically said “if you let me win this battle, I will convert my entire country”…
…and he won, and so Roman Catholicism was born cause he said so.
Later, some dude was like “screw your catholicism, I don’t like my wife any more, I’ll go make my own church with hookers and blow and divorce my wife,” and so the Church of England was made cause he said so.
I may have oversimplified these stories but pretty sure that’s about it.
Oxford University Is older than the Aztec civilization.
And, probably from the same Reddit thread, there were a pocket of woolly mammoths still doing woolly mammoth things when the pyramids were put up. In the same spirit the Sahara hadn’t fully stopped being habitable (as it was during the late ice age) yet, and that had an impact on Egyptian history.
The Near East really did get rolling pretty quickly once the warm period began, which is funny because there were areas that were arable all along. In a fair world we’d all be speaking an Australian language or something.
I read about it once. I think it was up to medieval times where sahara had lots of green batches and oasis? Though thats in the range of natural climate change.
Btw. most Alpine passes were unpassable from 900 to 1300, we had a mini ice age then.
Nah, green Sahara ended pretty early in the bronze age. The old kingdom Egyptians were really just getting the tail end of it. It was definitely natural, I don’t think that’s in question; the (non-mini) ice age was simply ending, about on schedule. It would have been a much slower change than what’s happening now.
There were a few trees that managed to hang on in one area, though, with the last being “accidentally” run over by the colonial-era French.
There was an infamous conman in my country by the name Sülün Osman. He has managed to con people by claiming to sell the Galata Bridge itself. After he was caught, his defense was “As long as there exists idiots that believe I can sell the bridge, I will keep selling this bridge.”
The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.
