Ancient History help for your games or characters
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I tend to be a major lurker, back from the WORA days, but I thought I would throw this out there.
So many games, especially supernatural / magically themed ones, have elements of ancient history woven into them. So, for example, characters might be themed on deities or heroes from various mythologies. And, well, this is my shtick.
My creds: I’m a PhD candidate in ancient studies and just finished my master’s thesis on Etruscan funerary iconography. I have three years of Latin behind me and enough Attic / Koine Greek to transliterate for you or to work through elementary sentences. My speciality is comparative mythology and funerary iconography. I am well-versed in Greek and Roman myths and ritual practices. I have a working knowledge of Vedic/Hindu, Akkadian/Sumerian, Egyptian, Celtic/Gaulish and Norse mythology. I have some knowledge of the mythologies of Japanese Shintoism and Chan / Zen Buddhism. My understanding of African mythology is limited to Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho oral history. (Don’t ask me anything about the Americas… I’m sorry.
) More importantly… I know how to research, and I am pretty sure I can find answers to your questions.So what am I offering?
- Want a name translated into Latin? (and maybe Greek)? I can do that.
- Want to know the family tree of a deity? I can do that.
- Want to know if Romans wore pants? I can do that!
- Want a primary source image of a deity that isn’t some fan artist gone wild? I can do that! [P.S. I love fan art. I do. But Athena in hoplite armour makes me weep for humanity.]
- Want to know the technical names for all the different versions of dressing an ancient lady’s hair? I can do that!
- Want me to get into the nitty-gritty of sexuality in the ancient world? I can do that! [I can also teach you filthy, filthy Latin, thanks to Catullus.]
Caveats: I’m not great with military terminology or history. But I can probably find it. I suck at dates but Wikipedia is a godsend (I’ll still probably get it wrong). I’m also not interested in fighting with people about minutia. I just want to help and contribute to this community, and this is how I think I can do it.
So ask all those burning questions, lovely folk.
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Was the Latin used Event Horizon accurate? This has been a question I’ve been wondering for years.
I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
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@Testament What is Event Horizon? (I’m assuming this is not just the scientific term?)
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@WhiteRaven It’s a sci-fi horror film from the late 90s. I’m just being silly because it’s early in the morning and work is slow. I actually think Latin is fascinating if I’m going to be honest. My dad took it in college decades ago and I was always interested in it.
I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
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@Testament - I found it! All hail Wikipedia.
“Liberate me” (“Save me”) -> I wouldn’t use liberate, but the form (imperative plural) is correct. From what I’ve seen, libero/liberare is most often used in the context of freeing someone from slavery, a manumission and freedmen were called libertus. If it is more akin to a rescue, I will use salvate.
“Liberate tutemet ex inferis” (“Save yourself from hell”). --> I’ve never seen tutemet before and had to look it up, but it seems legit. I dislike translating inferis as Hell. It’s where we get the word infernal from, meaning from below the earth. It’s more akin to the underworld than Hell, but we often see it translated this way in older English texts. And I’m probably totally nitpicking now.
In general, very good grammatically!
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@WhiteRaven I now want to see you and @Narson compete for historical factoids that make the rest of us go ‘wtf?’ but that could just be me daydreaming about historian cage matches.
(ETA - Also, Narson took Latin so there’s another point of interest on which you two could conspire.) -
@WhiteRaven Okay, that’s actually really fascinating! I’ve always wondered how accurate Latin in movies really is. I once dated someone who minored in Latin and had gone onto explain that there are so many different interpretations of a word in Latin that could potentially have different meanings.
There are times that I wish that it wasn’t a dead language, because it’s one of those languages that I find obscenely interesting. Thanks for explaining that for me!
I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
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@dvoraen
Lol. @Narson and I have spent many a long eve talking each other’s ears off on various topics. Basically it boils down to my stuff is too early for him, and his stuff is too late for me.
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Come to think of it, the only real Latin I know is due to taking Medical Terminology in college. I remember having to be very specific depending on what prefix or suffix I needed to use.
Like -tomy and -ectomy meaning two wholly different things. And of all the books I ever had in college, the thickest one I had was the dictionary I had to continually reference that was nothing but medical terminology.
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@Testament
It’s not as dead as you think! Even outside of the Vatican there has been a strong push over the last 10-20 years for more spoken Latin and Latin immersion classes as opposed to the old grammar-translation method.And culturally there’s been a huge cultural resurgence in Latin and Greek with people doing cool stuff like this:
Smells like Teen Spirit in Latin
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@WhiteRaven YOU HAVE MADE MY DAY! Thank you!
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I also forgot to mention. There are two TV series that came out entirely in Latin.
Barbarians, and Romulus. (The Latin in Romulus is archaic because it’s set before the founding of Rome).
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@WhiteRaven said in Ancient History help for your games or characters:
It’s not as dead as you think! Even outside of the Vatican there has been a strong push over the last 10-20 years for more spoken Latin and Latin immersion classes as opposed to the old grammar-translation method.
You mean I won’t need to learn the form for how to speak to a table??
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@WhiteRaven said in Ancient History help for your games or characters:
My creds: I’m a PhD candidate in ancient studies and just finished my master’s thesis on Etruscan funerary iconography.
Oh! Congrats/good luck. Yell if you need anything.
When someone shows you who they are, over and over again? Believe them.
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@Narson Booze, cocaine, and in two years’ time a reason to keep living. If I’m any judge.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
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@WhiteRaven said in Ancient History help for your games or characters:
@dvoraen
Lol. @Narson and I have spent many a long eve talking each other’s ears off on various topics. Basically it boils down to my stuff is too early for him, and his stuff is too late for me.I mean, it doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting! Though I must admit I tend to think my ‘OH COOL EARLY STUFF’ thinking goes to like, Anglo Saxons (we are doing stuff on medievalisms atm). Only tend to handle Greeks, Romans etc in an imagined emotional space created by the far right, not the real things at all.
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@Pavel said in Ancient History help for your games or characters:
@Narson Booze, cocaine, and in two years’ time a reason to keep living. If I’m any judge.
I have to admit, I mostly stopped making those jokes. I made them as a way of coping with the mental health trauma my own doctorate gave, but now I’m past it, and the stats coming out are so frightening, I don’t know. 70%+ of Postgraduate Researchers showing moderate to severe indications of phycological distress. It’s crazy how little support there is. Though I do also try to be very honest about my mental health as well, because the stigma compounds things.
There is some great research out of UEA and elsewhere about supportive peer networks, though they frame theirs around the use of “Guardian Supervisors” which I find rather problematic due to the lack of pastoral training given within supervisory training at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Peer support has helped in my experience and groups I’ve set up, so I do encourage making sure you talk to other PGRs.
When someone shows you who they are, over and over again? Believe them.
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@Narson Absolutely true on all counts. Even undergraduate programs are suffering from similar, though smaller numbers. It’s a travesty of the highest order.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
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@Pavel said in Ancient History help for your games or characters:
@Narson Absolutely true on all counts. Even undergraduate programs are suffering from similar, though smaller numbers. It’s a travesty of the highest order.
Oh absolutely, and COVID has not helped. I’ve been writing about ethics lately so this is all stuff rattling in my head. There is something interesting in how, in the UK, the problem has changed. It used to be, pre 2012 or so, that the issue was one of students suffering in silence. You still often see this in the “Elite” universities. Mental Health is still seen as a weakness, a black mark.
In universities, especially more regional ones, the issue since years of awareness etc, is now that services are massively oversubscribed. Students are waiting days and weeks for support, which doesn’t fit with the academic timetable when we have fixed exam periods etc. And as you say, it runs right through (If I remember it is something like undergrads have 3x higher MH incidences than the general population)
When someone shows you who they are, over and over again? Believe them.
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@Narson I’m doing undergraduate psychology at the moment, and even there mental health breaks are considered unexcused absences (we have a minimum attendance requirement for accreditation by the various psych and counselling boards). It’s ridiculous.
