I've been cleaning my room all day, and probably have to throw some food out tonight, but I had my podcast on the whole time.
I recently subscribed to
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. He does a really good job describing events in history without drowning you with dates and names of people that you could give two flips about. And he's really passionate about it all, which makes it better. And Dan knows how to put things in perspective too.
The whole point of this entry was just to say that thank God I didn't exist around Roman/pre-Roman era life. One of the shows I just finished listening to was about the Scythians, a barbaric tribe from the Asian steppes that were on the scale of the Assyrians in terms of just being incredibly bloodthristy people. Now Dan makes a point to say, "Well, these people were also incredible. They are the inspiration behind the legend of the centaurs, people who were so adept at riding the horses that they seemed to be a part of the horse." And of course their marksmanship with the bow was legendary as well. They were recorded as being able to shoot birds out of the air, and could shoot twelve arrows per minute on average. And given that their bows were so strong, it took immense strength just to pull back the bow once. Some of these bows took several years to make.
But the barbaric acts of the Scythians still seem to outweigh any sense of awe they could inspire in me. They were the type of civilization that would chat about battles as if it was like going out shopping. Apparently they drank the blood of the first slain enemy on the battlefield. They used skulls for caps and human skin for napkins (and they do have archaeological evidence of this as well). They would routinely make human sacrifices. And they must have looked bizarre to the Romans and Chinese because they were heavily tattooed, their skulls had been elongated, and they had facial scarring from when their mothers would cut their cheeks as children as so that they would not grow facial hair. And what's interesting is you would think these people looked Asian, but Gengis Kahn, a member of the steppe region, the Mongols, had red hair. Some of these people were tall, some Caucasian. If you remember the famous National Geographic cover of the Afghan girl who has the features of a Middle Eastern person, but striking green eyes, it is because she is a descendant of this steppe culture.
What was probably the eeriest information is that archaeologists uncovered Scythian tombs, which had been preserved in ice. And they found hundreds of bodies, one tomb of a king had over 300 corpses of people who voluntarily sacrificed themselves to be placed in this tomb. It is said that a wife would do the same thing. They also found people mounted on horses, propped up by being impaled by stakes, giving this grim twist of images of a merri-go-round.
Anyhoo, I need to get Mardig to help me take down Max's desk. I already accidently destroyed the top shelf on it, but I don't think I need, so it's no great loss.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
craterchest's journal
