We can see in markers of extreme poverty in remains of people who died in pre-modern times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_bioarchaeology# >>Anne L. Grauer, Professor of Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago, assessed the presence of porotic hyperostosis and periosteal reactions in the population (n=1,014) from St. Helen-on-the-Walls in York, England. She used porotic hyperostosis and periosteal reactions…
This would be more useful with detail on what share of the population lived in urban environments, as well as insight into what life was life for the share that didn’t. Do you know that? Do you have that?
We have the Domesday Book from the 11th century which was a complete survey of the entire country, and we have parish and monastic records, wills, town charters and tax accounts from later periods. Of course there are gaps and ambiguities but we’re far from blind about those times.
ughh I dislike when pop history takes this smarmy tone and is also not particularly accurate. > In fact soap is a motherfucking medieval invention. Yes. It is. The Romans – whomst I don’t see a bunch of basics going around accusing of being filthy – did not, in fact have soap, in contrast. They usually washed using oil. Medieval people? Oh you better believe that they had soap. Wait a minute, what about Aleppo soap?…
I think it's incredibly silly how tied we are to the idea that something was invented once and then spread. Soap is literally just a fatty acid salt with some phytochemicals that have antimicrobial properties (extremely easy to come by considering most secondary metabolites of plants are specifically produced to keep them from succumbing to bacterial/fungal degradation). Soap has probably been "invented" a million ti…
I used to think that the printing press has been invented once and then spread, how many times has the printing press with movable types been invented?
> Depends on what you mean by poverty. I mean, how does one even measure it a 1000 years ago. It's called anthropology, linguistics, geology, and history. They're legitimate fields with highly qualified and knowledgeable professionals. Through their efforts we have a decent idea of what various cultures and lives were like even a thousand years ago through carbon dating, archaeological digs, artefacts, and so forth.
I see some anthropologists themselves quarrelling over the definition of 'poverty' though. Yes they are much knowledgeable than us, but you shouldn't think of them having a straightforward 'answer' like what you usually have for math problems. So if you are bringing academic authorities to the question, at least namedrop some academics/books/papers, so people can have a constructive debate about this.
That’s not how this works; you cannot discredit an entire scientific field and then demand some papers and books for the lazy to get into it. Anthropology has a corpus of millions of papers, and you demand what? A proof that they aren’t full of themselves.
Its funny that western history distorts the history of the rest of the world. I hear western kids saying no one used to bathe in the ancient times. As an Indian, it was practically mandatory for each and every individual to take a bath at-least two times a day. Additionally the following customs were very prevalent till recent times. 1. Washing legs after coming home from outside. 2. Washing hands, face and legs befo…
Keep in mind that India was and is a huge and diverse place. A unified India did not exist until fairly recently. Neither as a political entity nor as a culture one.
This is blatantly false. A western trope resounding forever.
Culturally India was a unified entity for millenia. As in, perhaps not having a unified government, but having the same cultural and literary background throughout the region.
Ancient texts like Ramayana and Mahabharata talk about various places and practices across the length and breadth of India, which are remarkably similar and have a unified core.
The greatest temples of Hinduism are not concentrated in one place, but spread over the entirety of the continent. And those are ancient temples. From Saraswati Temple in Kashmir to the Bhagavathi temple in Kanya Kumari.
The idea that India was not a cultural entity was a British invention
Its funny that western history distorts the history of the rest of the world. I hear western kids saying no one used to bathe in the ancient times. As an Indian, it was practically mandatory for each and every individual to take a bath at-least two times a day. Additionally the following customs were very prevalent till recent times. 1. Washing legs after coming home from outside. 2. Washing hands, face and legs befo…
Keep in mind that India was and is a huge and diverse place. A unified India did not exist until fairly recently. Neither as a political entity nor as a culture one.
Speaking to some people from India, and my own readings what combined their society was a couple of things : a deep connection to the traditions such as the vedas, sanskrit, gods, brahmanism. And even if there was divergence, it was usually with a deep respect for what had gone before. So surely while there was a lot of cultural divergence, there was also a lot of things that made it into the India we see today. Some empires also endured a long time to make more of cultural unity. I am not sure in how far Bharat was used for the whole subcontinent and where.
I can just imagine the reaction of a stone-ager being berated because they hadn't come up with "literally just a fatty acid salt with some phytochemicals that have antimicrobial properties". I suspect you could pick just about any tech invented in the last decade and describe it as "literally just a pick-your-adjective noun with some other random nouns that have something-or-another properties"... Explain again why a…
Turns out soap is not THAT essential to personal hygiene, if you have running water. The point of bathing is to rub off dead skin cells, excess oil off your skin (note that I said excess). And you can actually do all that without soap. Also note that sweat it's not that stinky when it evaporates quickly (for example, behind loose non-western clothes in a hot environment) Soap helps a lot, of course, but the usual ste…
Obviously it's not strictly essential at all, given how many 10s of 1000s of years humanity survived without it - but once invented among a particular population I would think its usefulness (for various purposes) would be obvious enough that unless the raw materials become impossible to obtain, production would continue.
Do you have a source for this? I’d be surprised if we know this much detail and accuracy about how peasants lived hundreds of years ago.
https://indianculture.gov.in/ebooks/daily-life-ancient-india... A book by a westerner.
It’s shocking how incongruent your views are with the text from the book (see sibling comment). Do you just selectively choose which parts of the book to believe or do you not believe peasants were any substantial part of the population and are therefore not worth caring about?
The Old Norse word for Saturday, laugardagr, literally means "washing day". This custom still survives here in countryside Eastern Europe where many people routinely go to sauna (banya) every Saturday (or Sunday like my family). Before the 20th century, a lot of Eastern Europe (especially Russia) still lived like they lived in the middle ages: 95% of the country were serfs on feudal property living in traditional wooden houses with no modern benefits of civilization, and the bathing culture was pervasive: there were saunas (banyas) everywhere, and most villages were close to a river so water access was not a problem. Saunas were also a place where people gave birth. I find it hard to believe that Russian peasants were living the same lifestyle for centuries and only recently decided to start bathing. My family comes from Old Believers, a religous group which rejected church reforms of the 1600's and went into hiding in taiga, they preserved pretty ancient customs and their bathing culture was pretty intricate: for example, there always must be a separate towel/bucket of water for head, body, feet - this wouldn't have developed without a rich bathing culture before. Those villagers who could not afford their own sauna bathed in... ovens (inside the house). It's one of the older customs still preserved in some places. The traditional oven was pretty large and a whole person could fit in it. My mother was bathed like that when she was a child in their Old Believer village. However, I don't know if this was specific to Eastern/Northern Europe or common in Western Europe, too. I remember reading that due to overpopulation and deforestation it was harder for West Europeans to have frequent bathing every week. But here, population wasn't dense and forests were abundant.
If you read translations of early medieval Arabic language travelers that visited Europe, they were almost all universally appalled by the state of hygiene and sewage/waste in major cities in general.
Not saying people didn't bathe at all but it clearly didn't meet societally acceptable standards of an educated person from Cairo or Baghdad.