huldratigress

Huldra

@huldratigress

Born too late to be an uptight Babylonian priest, born too soon to explore the stars, born just in time to be mentally ill and die in the climate apocalypse

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huldratigress
@huldratigress

I'm currently reading a book about the finer points of sheep and shepherd administration in late-period Mesopotamian temples. And while it is quite boring, one thing that's steadily starting to interest me is just how different bureaucracy was back then.

For example: for decades now, scholars have been dealing with this problem where the legal contracts and accounting documents used by the temple of Eanna specified a per-sheep amount of wool that seemed impossibly high. This number was 1.5 mina or about (by my math, using the chart in Robson's Mathematics in Ancient Iraq) 3/4kg. Herdsmen were almost never capable of meeting this number, and according to scribal records, the average amount of wool obtained per-sheep was closer to 1.08 mina. This has lead many historians to assume that the economy was just in total disarray as society was chronically incapable of supplying basic goods like wool. However, on closer inspection, this doesn't seem to be the case, and at least a few historians have noted that the Eanna temple maintained considerable wool surpluses, and was able to sell and amass large quantities of wool. So, why did countless legal contracts and accounting documents use that number? Well, this is 600BCE, accounting, measuring, and inspecting are expensive and time-consuming. So it's easier to just have your shepherd agree to a contract of 1.5 minas per sheep of wool, and take whatever wool you get up to that amount, and call it a day. Any amount over 1.5 minas the shepherds keep, which means a few of them will turn a small profit. As the author states:

In short, the temple expected the herdsmen to fall short of the contractual stipulations as written, but the informal guideline remained that all the females and wool belonged to the Eanna. Indeed, more realistic expectations might have invited opportunities for shirking and dissembling. By claiming whole sets of animals and animal products, the temple then did away with the administrative problems that arose from apportioning.

I find this sort of thing just...wonderfully quaint. Now we live in a world where you have to piss in a bottle so you meet your Bezos Approved Packing Quotas, and you get written up if your break is 0.03 seconds too long, but in 630 BCE? Eh, we just make up a number, and whatever you got, you got.

huldratigress
@huldratigress

If you're autistic you need to start watching Yorgos Lanthimos movies

I talked about this on Mastodon a while ago but I'm saying it here again. If you're autistic and you haven't watched any of Yorgos Lanthimos's movies you're absolutely missing out. The dude is an unhinged freak (compliment) and all of his movies are about how utterly average, unquestioned social norms are actually the stuff of nightmares. If you're autistic and social norms are already the stuff of nightmares all his movies will make perfect sense.

Some recommendations:

The Lobster - Heteronormative dating culture is very healthy and completely reasonable. Also if you're single for too long you get turned into an animal and sent off into the woods.

Dogtooth - Your parents love you, and just want to raise you right, which is why they sometimes do things that seem like they might violate the Geneva convention.

The Killing Of A Sacred Deer - The social pressures of being a white collar, picture perfect suburban family are not at all excessive or deranged. Sometimes you just gotta chain a teenage boy up to a pipe in your basement for normal family reasons.

Nimic - Ever felt like someone trying to talk to you on public transit was the most invasive possible thing a human being could do? Well....

huldratigress
@huldratigress

Movies With Huldra: Total Recall

Total Recall Review

Imperialism is older than most people realize. Back when Rome was an irrelevant Mediterranean monarchy, there was the Assyrian empire, and later, the Babylonian empire. Assyria tore its way though modern-day Egypt up to Turkey, creating the economic and political blueprint for empire in the process. To an imperial power, nothing is scared, because nothing can be—contrary to the propaganda that empire generates, imperialism is not about safety, or glory, or god, but about economic necessity. Once an empire can no longer conquer and extract, the system collapses—just as it did in Assyria. This necessity demands brutality; for Assyria, punishing tribute payments, slavery, and mass expulsions kept conquered territories under control. (This strategy would later be copied by the Babylonians when Nebuchadnezzar II captured Judah, cementing Babylon's place in the Hebrew bible)

Verhoeven's depiction of imperialism (and by extension, colonialism and fascism) is uniquely lucid in the realm of 20th century sci-fi cinema, and it's further aided by Philip K. Dick's paranoia about a collapsing sense of reality and personality under authoritarianism. Total Recall's vision of colonialism's future is as natural and logical as it is violent and absurd; if the past demonstrates that human life and freedom are doomed to fall under the sword—then so too shall memory also fall. After all, to empire, nothing is sacred.