Did you know that the ancient Romans believed that the blood of gladiators was a possible cure for epilepsy? Maybe you didn’t want to know that, but quite often, all the interesting and weird details from history get buried during quite boring and dusty middle school classes. Fortunately, many have discovered that memes are a wonderful way to actually cover these topics in an engaging way.
The “History In Memes 3” Instagram page shares hilarious and insightful posts about the past. So get comfortable as you scroll through, upvote your favorites and be sure to share your own thoughts in the comments section below. We also got in touch with archeologist and historian Ari Akkermans to learn more.
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Bored Panda got in touch with archaeologist and historian Ari Akkermans to cover parts of history that often go overlooked. After all, the record is mostly made by things that were actually “left behind,” which ignores all the objects and items that were lost to time. So we asked him to give some examples of objects, artifacts, etc that were common in the past but are just not around anymore.
“First, the Kilia idol. Super common in the late Neolithic and Bronze Age, only 15 have been found complete, and thousands of small fragments, I'm one of the few experts in the topic and one of the idols held in Istanbul, bought from an auction, was a central character in my film After Utopia: The Birds, a collaboration with Feleksan Onar at an archaeological museum in Turkey,” he shared.
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Other examples were quite a bit larger. “The Temple of Apollo in Antioch, nothing remains of it,” he shared. “Not because of the 50 earthquakes that rocked the city, most likely destroyed by Christians after it survived many generations.” An important temple in an important, large city, lost to time.
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If that sounds bad, you might be surprised to learn that some even important things are also just lost or destroyed. For example, one other lost item is “The tomb of Alexander the Great, although there are many ongoing excavations right now in Egypt to find it, of course under a nationalist viewpoint.”
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“The original manuscripts of the poetry of Sappho, and most Archaic poetry, including plays by Aescylus, Euripides,etc, a whole lot of literature! Which were lost with the Library of Alexandria among other catastrophes in the ancient world,” he shared with Bored Panda.
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This wasn’t even the only bit of language we can no longer access. “Tablets in the languages that preceded Greek, namely Minoan, in the Bronze Age. There's only a couple of inscriptions and the famous Linear A and B, though it might have been written as extensively as Babylonian. The first language Linear A has not been deciphered, the second language, Linear B, has only one fully deciphered text.”
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Similarly, “Old South Arabian inscriptions. Four entire languages, including Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic and Minean, and Hasaitic. including the ancestors of Arabic and Ethiopia's Ge'ez, all Semitic languages, have only 15,000 inscriptions left. For a comparison, the corpus of Ancient and Byzantine Greek is over 105 million words and some 20,000 inscriptions.”
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“Most Byzantine art during the 4th crusade,” he added, was destroyed by crusaders. “A lot of it is in Italy, but mostly has been lost. For such a long and important period, Byzantine art exists in incredibly small amounts, except for coins.”
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Remember, in most cases, the things that survive are made from strong, durable materials. “Many of the marble and stone idols we have from the Paleolithic and Neolithic existed in cheaper versions in wood that we assume the poor mass produced and bought (like the Kilia idol or the Neolithic Mother Goddesses). But wood doesn't survive well, the oxidation process eats it up, few examples exist, sometimes preserved in water or in caves,” he shared.
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Interestingly, this even happened in the past. “The 7th century Archaic Greek city of Sybaris, in Calabria, southern Italy, is buried underneath an aquifer, and although the site is known, it cannot be excavated, the site will flood with water within minutes. I worked at the site with a team of artists last year. It was already lost in the 4th century BCE.” If you want to see more of Ari’s work, check out his Instagram and Linktree.
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The truth is that without archaeologists taking steps to find and preserve these things, much would be lost. We tend to think of historical artifacts as being hidden in some tombs, but realistically, most were household items that just ended up being thrown out. Tombs, incidentally, are “great” because no one is looting them (for the most part.) It’s important to keep these ideas in mind when thinking about the past. We know a lot about things that are still around, but our minds tend to not fill in the blanks effectively. Picture a medieval street? How colorful is it? Because, in reality, most people would have colored clothes, and yet the concept seems so weird in our eyes. This is probably why memes can do a lot of work to teach people about the past.
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