TheHipcrimeVocab

TheHipcrimeVocab t1_je7rxyz wrote

Cool article. The British controlled Egypt in 1936, so it would be impossible for a massive German excavation to take place just outside of Cairo. But, hey, it's a movie!

I found this odd: "The sadistic Sturmbannführer Arnold Toht (the surname is an Egyptian wink, recalling the name of the scribe god Thot..." First, I've never heard him given a first name, so I don't know where that came from. Second, I'm pretty sure his name is related to the German word for death (e.g. Tohtenkopf; "Death's Head"), not an Egyptian god.

This article talks about how burials in Northern Europe were used for propaganda purposes by the Nazis:

>The ideology of 1930s Germany helped shape scholars’ initial interpretation of the grave. Discovered barely a year and a half after the Nazis took power, politics quickly became enmeshed in the skeleton’s story. Archaeologists were a fundamental part of Adolf Hitler’s nation-building program, which sought to locate physical evidence of the original Aryans, who the Nazis believed were blond-haired and blue-eyed and came from northern Europe. Hoping to support this idea, another archaeologist on the scene—who was a member of the Amt Rosenberg, a cultural policy and surveillance body within the Nazi party—proclaimed the grave that of an ur-Aryan based on the presence of the single stone ax and microliths. “The Nazis thought the burial belonged to a white man from the Neolithic,” says Harald Meller, director of the State Museum of Prehistory, an erroneous and dangerous conclusion that was part of a larger campaign to prove that the German “race” had been in northern Europe for thousands of years.

https://www.archaeology.org/issues/501-2303/features/11195-germany-mesolithic-shaman-burial

83

TheHipcrimeVocab t1_ivw50l5 wrote

By coincidence, a while back I became fascinated by Roman religion. Roman religion is so much more complex and multifaceted than just the pantheon of gods and Greek-derived myths we learn about in school. It infused every aspect of society, including tutelary deities, ancestor cults, family cults, demons, spirits, festivals, sacrifices, etc. Every person was thought to have their own spirit, called a genius, which is where we get that word (it also influenced His Dark Materials)

For priests specifically, Wikipedia has a very good page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_ancient_Rome#Public_priesthoods_and_religious_law

See also: http://www.classicsunveiled.com/romel/html/religion.html

I became interested in this topic after reading The Ancient City by Foustel de Coulanges. I would recommend that book if you want to know more.

3

TheHipcrimeVocab t1_it539bn wrote

Wasn't people's wealth in the past much more tied to the land and their family/social networks than in the present? It's not like there was a job market back then. You don't send out resumes. It's not like you can just show up in a city and expect to make a living. To do what? Odd jobs? Crime? People were generally much less mobile and footloose in the past and much more embedded in local contexts prior to the Industrial Revolution and depersonalization of relationships allowed by money and bureaucratization.

I would imagine those who had extensive experience in governmental administration and/or made their living though education/literacy would be able to move, but that's a small subset of the population.

7