Tony Robinson explores the major uprising across large parts of England in 1381, its origins, motives and aftermath.
Tony Robinson explores the major uprising across large parts of England in 1381, its origins, motives and aftermath.
Tony Robinson presents a series examining some of history’s least pleasant employment opportunities. He begins in the first millennium, trying his hand at everyday tasks including back-breaking mining by ancient Roman methods, and Saxon ploughing using wooden implements and oxen. He also enters the world of the Viking egg collector, which involved scaling cliff faces in search of guillemot eggs.
Art aficionados like to pretend that there’s a very specific and complex science behind interpreting paintings. But as these humorous tweets reveal, the hidden messages are often pretty obvious, not to mention pretty funny!
These modern interpretations of centuries-old paintings come courtesy of Medieval Reactions, a wryly funny Twitter account that’s making people smile with its contemporary take on traditional artwork. And as you can see, it appears that the observations and dilemmas faced by our ancestors aren’t that much different to those of today! Don’t forget to vote for your favorite!
Source: Decoded: The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been explained — Secret History — Sott.net
History researcher says that it’s a mostly plagiarized guide to women’s health.
Since its discovery in 1912, the 15th century Voynich Manuscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon. Full of handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with weird pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women’s health that’s mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.
Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale’s Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.
After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. “From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry,” he wrote. “The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc.” So this wasn’t a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.
Further study of the herbs and images in the book reminded Gibbs of other Latin medical texts. When he consulted the Trotula and De Balneis Puteolanis, two commonly copied medieval Latin medical books, he realized that a lot of the Voynich Manuscript’s text and images had been plagiarized directly from them (they, in turn, were copied in part from ancient Latin texts by Galen, Pliny, and Hippocrates). During the Middle Ages, it was very common for scribes to reproduce older texts to preserve the knowledge in them. There were no formal rules about copyright and authorship, and indeed books were extremely rare, so nobody complained.
Once he realized that the Voynich Manuscript was a medical textbook, Gibbs explained, it helped him understand the odd images in it. Pictures of plants referred to herbal medicines, and all the images of bathing women marked it out as a gynecological manual. Baths were often prescribed as medicine, and the Romans were particularly fond of the idea that a nice dip could cure all ills. Zodiac maps were included because ancient and medieval doctors believed that certain cures worked better under specific astrological signs. Gibbs even identified one image-copied, of course, from another manuscript-of women holding donut-shaped magnets in baths. Even back then, people believed in the pseudoscience of magnets. (The women’s pseudoscience health website Goop would fit right in during the 15th century.)
The Voynich Manuscript has been reliably dated to mere decades before the invention of the printing press, so it’s likely that its peculiar blend of plagiarism and curation was a dying format. Once people could just reproduce several copies of the original Trotula or De Balneis Puteolanis on a printing press, there would have been no need for scribes to painstakingly collate its information into a new, handwritten volume.
Gibbs concluded that it’s likely the Voynich Manuscript was a customized book, possibly created for one person, devoted mostly to women’s medicine. Other medieval Latin scholars will certainly want to weigh in, but the sheer mundanity of Gibbs’ discovery makes it sound plausible.
See for yourself! You can look at pages from the Voynich Manuscript here.
I hate to break it to you but if your God /religion permits you to kill others who don’t believe, you have a fake God.
Source: Pakistani Christian sentenced to death for sending Islam-insulting poem via WhatsApp — RT News
“[Nadeem] James was handed a death sentence by the court Thursday on blasphemy charges,” James’ defence lawyer Anjum Wakeel told AFP Friday. Wakeel said James will “appeal the sentence in the high court as he has been framed by his friend [Yasir Bashir] who was annoyed over James’ affair with a Muslim girl.”
James was held inside the prison for safety reasons as local Muslim clerics repeatedly threatened his family, the lawyer added.
The story of James from the town of Sarai Alamgir in Punjab province hit the headlines in summer 2016.
James, 28, is “illiterate and works as a tailor”, according to the Rescue Christians charity group which fights persecution of Christians.
The group said Pakistani police also “intimidated” James’s family and arrested his sisters-in-law. “They were threatened with prosecution if they did not give up their brother,” the group said, adding that the women were later released.
In July 2016, James shared the details of the incident to the Rescue Christians group.
“… One of my friends sent me a WhatsApp message. I forwarded it to the Muslim friends as I was not educated and unaware of the contents written in the messages. [Now] they are after me to kill me as they believe that I have committed blasphemy against their prophet,” he stated.
The man continued, saying his Muslim friends “wanted to kill him” and sent a complaint to police who later raided his home and eventually arrested him.
“Nadeem is uneducated and could not have possibly sent that text message. I’m certain that Yasir Bashir downloaded the supposedly blasphemous text onto Nadeem’s phone and then forwarded it to his cell number to build a case against my brother,” the man’s sibling Shahbaz James, told the Morning Star News, an independent news service focusing on persecution of Christians.
The charge of blasphemy can carry heavy sentences in Pakistan. According to Amnesty International, “Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are often used against religious minorities.”
A 2016 Amnesty report ”shows how once a person is accused, they become ensnared in a system that offers them few protections, presumes them guilty, and fails to safeguard them against people willing to use violence.”
Published on 7 Aug 2017
What? Can’t do the Macarena? Saudi Arabia is a barbaric country.
Source: Hey Macarena: Dancing teen arrested in Saudi Arabia – World – CBC News
CBC News
The Associated Press
Posted: Aug 23, 2017
(ahmed/Twitter)
Western music and dancing are taboo in Saudi Arabia, but such incidents have not necessarily led to lengthy imprisonment or serious punishment.
Police in Saudi Arabia arrested and later released a 14-year-old boy who was filmed dancing to the ’90s hit song Macarena at an intersection in the Red Sea city of Jeddah, according to local media reports on Wednesday.
The 45-second video, which went viral on social media in the kingdom, shows the boy wearing headphones, sweat shorts, a striped shirt and neon Crocs. He sways his hips and arms to the Los Del Rio song, and appears to be smiling and giggling throughout the dance.
More words:
Hey Macarena: Dancing teen arrested in Saudi Arabia – World – CBC News
Comment: UPDATE from Ars Technica:
Scholars have started to debunk these claims about the Voynich manuscript, noting that the translation “makes no sense” and that a lot of the so-called original findings were done by other researchers.