Spencer McDaniel

. . . is because art history majors may be more likely to accept *any* job they are offered, no matter the pay, whether it requires a degree, or whether it is what they really want to do, whereas engineering majors are more likely to hold out for a high-paying job offer in their field.

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I absolutely don't dispute that humanities majors are great and valuable, but I'd be interested to see what the *under*employment statistics here look like. I suspect that part of the reason why recently graduated engineering majors are more likely to be unemployed than art history majors. . .

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It's fine. I've made my share of similar mistakes. Omnes erramus.

"Mid-*nineteenth* century"? I think you mean mid-twentieth century.

I'm very glad to hear that you enjoyed the post!

Cernunnos gets a lot of attention today especially in Neopagan circles, even though surprisingly little is known about his historical worship in antiquity. As I note in the article, the name "Cernunnos" is known solely from one Roman-period inscription.

A red-figure cup with two handles, featuring a central depiction of a stylized owl flanked by olive leaves. The owl is painted in a reddish-brown hue against the black background.

#SaturdayMorningMood: a #Greek skyphos (a two handled drinking cup), decorated with an adorable #owl.

Dating second half of the 5th century BC.

On display at Museum August Kestner, Hannover.

📷 me

🏺

Why Do Ancient Egyptian Gods Have Animal Heads??? - Tales of Times Forgotten Modern people have often found ancient Egyptian depictions of their gods perplexing and strange, since many of them bear the heads or other features of animals. If you’ve ever wondered why the Egyptia...

Have you ever wondered why most ancient Egyptian gods are depicted in art with animal heads? In this post, I explore the context and history of Egyptian gods and their human-animal iconographies.

#AncientEgypt #history #Egyptology

talesoftimesforgotten.com/2025/07/31/w...

Later, in the first century BCE, the Romans incorporated the wall bearing the text of the code into their Odeion or amphitheater which stands at the site, which resulted in the preservation of the code through its incorporation into the later structure.

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The most widely accepted hypothesis among scholars is that the building on which the law code was inscribed was most likely a Bouleuterion or meeting house for the Boule or Council of the city-state in the fifth century BCE.

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The photo Bret has shared above is of the law code of Gortyn, a Greek city-state on the island of Krete. Sometime in the first half of the fifth century BCE, someone inscribed the text of the code on the interior circular wall of a building.

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In eighth grade, I was in a cooking group with a boy who was actually ambitious about cooking and wanted to make an extremely challenging cake design, but, at the same time, he never washed his hands and left dirty tissues from blowing his nose lying *in* the cake batter.

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Yeah, there was also an inadequacy of supervision during the cooking section and inadequate emphasis on the importance of sanitation and hygiene.

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I think that an even deeper issue is that most students have been socialized to see home economics tasks like cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, etc. as inherently feminine and unserious.

Although the class was graded, for the boys in the class, to do well in the class was to be unmasculine.

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Most of the students in the class were also, I think, too young and immature to understand the necessity of learning to cook and, as I mentioned, most of the students, especially the boys, viewed the whole class as a joke.

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The class *did* have a mandatory cooking section, but the class itself only lasted for a quarter of the school year in seventh and eighth grades and the cooking section was only ever for a few weeks out of that time, which wasn’t really enough time for anyone to learn how to cook.

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Both of the FACS teachers I had seemed wildly unqualified, the curriculum was broad and poorly defined, a significant proportion of class time was spent doing pseudoscientific pop psychology quizzes, and most of the students (especially the boys) goofed off and didn’t take it seriously.

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I’m twenty-five years old and I *did* have a class like home economics in middle school that all students were required to take. It was called “Family and Consumer Sciences” or “FACS,” but it had a whole host of problems.

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Drawing of the outside of the tablet by RSO Tomlin - only a couple of lines of Roman cursive are visible

Drawing by RSO Tomlin of the inside of the tablet - many more lines of cursive are visible

I’ve been reading through Latin curse tablets (defixiones) and thought this one from Roman-period Britain was neat: someone seemingly cursing the person who stole their beehive ‘vas apium’)! 🐝 (Brit. 48.10 10; text and images: romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions...; images by R.S.O. Tomlin)

. . . a witch herself, which led Warren to confess and go back to being afflicted and accusing people.

Baker also notes instances where the girls' hands were seemingly supernaturally tied with cords, which they could only have pulled off through fraudulent conspiracy/collaboration.

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Baker notes that the evidence for deliberate fraud or exaggeration of symptoms among the later accusers especially is considerable. For instance, Mary Warren, who was initially one of the afflicted, recanted and said that the other girls "did dissemble." Then, the others accused her of being. . .
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Baker concludes (rightly, I think) that Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams (who showed symptoms of witchcraft affliction first) were affected by mass psychogenic illness. The later people who claimed to be afflicted were experiencing mass psychogenic illness as well and/or deliberately faking.
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Oh look, it's the back of my head!

Here are photos of the most relevant pages of Baker's book from my copy, in case you just want to read those pages without buying the whole book (although, if you are interested in the Salem trials, I do highly recommend the whole thing, since it is very fascinating).

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I highly recommend Emerson W. Baker's discussion of the Salem afflicted in his academic monograph 'A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience' (Oxford University Press, 2015), pages 98–125, especially his rejection of the ergotism hypothesis on pages 109–110.

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The ergotism hypothesis for the Salem witch trials is popular in fringe circles, but academic historians who have seriously studied the trials universally reject it (for very good reasons).

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Terracotta of an Amazon, mounted on a horse, wearing a cuirass molded to show female anatomy, wearing a knobbed Montefortino helmet with holes where plumes could be inserted.

Depictions of female anatomical cuirasses are relatively rare in the ancient world, even on mythical female warriors.

But this Amazon terracotta from Canosa shows that "boob armor" pairs quite well with a Montefortino helmet.

Note the drill holes on top for plumes!

My photo collage shows four Minoan artefacts on display at Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete. Top left: a rhyton (ritual vessel for pouring liquid offerings) carved from black steatite in the shape of a bull's head. Museum info: ‘only the left side of the head is original. The horns, which were not found, would have been made of gilded wood. The head and neck are rendered very naturalistically, while details such as the hair are shown in relief or rendered with incisions. The eyes are inlaid with rock crystal and jasper, while the muzzle is highlighted with inlaid white shell. The crystal preserved in the right eye has a concave back which magnifies the pupil, giving the animal a lively expressiveness’. From the Little Palace at Knossos. Neopalatial period, 1600-1500 BC. Top R: a rhyton carved from off-white limestone in the shape of a lioness’s head. It originally had coloured inlays to emphasise the eyes and muzzle, which are now lost. From Knossos Palace, 1650-1500 BC. Bottom L: Wine jar (pithamphoreas) with many handles, decorated in the marine style with octopuses, tritons, rocks and coral. From Knossos Palace, late Neopalatial period. Bottom R: Famous Minoan gold bee pendant which consists of two bees facing each other in the process of depositing a drop of honey in their honeycomb. They hold a round, granulated honeycomb between their legs and a round gold ‘drop’ of honey in their mouths. On their heads is a spherical filigree cage enclosing a solid gold sphere. Three cut-out circular gold discs decorated with filigree and granulation hang from their wings and sting. Excavated from the Chrysolakkos necropolis, Malia, Crete, dated 1800 BC.

Great news! UNESCO adds Minoan Palace sites in Crete, Greece, to World Heritage list!

Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Zakros, Zominthos and Kydonia, are six archaeological sites dating 1900 to 1100 BC, representing the Minoan civilization, a major prehistoric Mediterranean culture 🏺
📷 by me

#Archaeology

In all likelihood, this statuette represents the goddess Taweret, whose domain was the protection of pregnant women, especially during childbirth. Her menacing image, intended to frighten away demons and other deadly creatures, combines human, hippopotamus, crocodile, and lion attributes. The post on her head probably supported a metal crown in the shape of a sun disk, surmounted by either feathers or horns. The stylized symbol under her front paws can be best interpreted as the sa amulet. Although Taweret was worshipped in both secular and sacred settings, this statuette's almost perfect condition, exceptional craftsmanship, size, and iconography suggest that it was created for a temple—possibly for the "birth house" where this goddess was linked with Isis. Ptolemaic, Egypt, Northern Upper Egypt, Qena area, ca. 332-30 BCE. Glassy faience. Met Museum, New York (26.7.1193)

Strangely enough, I’ve seen this very thing on the Venice beach boardwalk: a topless woman on a rented scooter. Wheee!!

In this case, however, it’s a glassy faience statuette of the Egyptian goddess Taweret, protector of women during childbirth, holding a sa amulet. 🏺

Ptolemaic, #MetMuseum. 📸 me

This same person kept insisting that he wasn't a white supremacist (even though he was openly calling for the ethnic cleansing of racial minorities in North America for the creation of a white ethnostate) because he believed that East Asians have higher average IQs than white people.