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50 Memes That Shed Light On Our Past And Are Hilarious At The Same Time
Interview With Expert
Did you know that the ancient Romans believed that the blood of gladiators was a possible cure for epilepsy? Maybe you didn’t want to know that, but quite often, all the interesting and weird details from history get buried during quite boring and dusty middle school classes. Fortunately, many have discovered that memes are a wonderful way to actually cover these topics in an engaging way.
The “History In Memes 3” Instagram page shares hilarious and insightful posts about the past. So get comfortable as you scroll through, upvote your favorites and be sure to share your own thoughts in the comments section below. We also got in touch with archeologist and historian Ari Akkermans to learn more.
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Bored Panda got in touch with archaeologist and historian Ari Akkermans to cover parts of history that often go overlooked. After all, the record is mostly made by things that were actually “left behind,” which ignores all the objects and items that were lost to time. So we asked him to give some examples of objects, artifacts, etc that were common in the past but are just not around anymore.
“First, the Kilia idol. Super common in the late Neolithic and Bronze Age, only 15 have been found complete, and thousands of small fragments, I'm one of the few experts in the topic and one of the idols held in Istanbul, bought from an auction, was a central character in my film After Utopia: The Birds, a collaboration with Feleksan Onar at an archaeological museum in Turkey,” he shared.
#4
Ray Ceeya (RayCeeYa) 4 months ago
Back in 2017 a muslim girl got on the tram here and a woman walked up yanked off her Hijab and screamed "THIS IS DONALD TRUMP'S AMERICA NOW!". Can you even imagine? That happened here in blue as blue gets Portland Oregon.
#6
Other examples were quite a bit larger. “The Temple of Apollo in Antioch, nothing remains of it,” he shared. “Not because of the 50 earthquakes that rocked the city, most likely destroyed by Christians after it survived many generations.” An important temple in an important, large city, lost to time.
#7
tresgatos72 4 months ago (edited)
I sat in a parent conference once where the parent was insisting that his son not be taight anything that wasn't in the Bible - IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL - because "unless it's mentioned in the Bible it isn't true." I looked him straight in the eye and asked, "So you're telling me that George Washington didn't exist? He isn't in the Bible. What about cars and airplanes? Those aren't in the Bible either." His facial expression was priceless.
#8
Anon822209 4 months ago
Cancel? No. Tear down memorials to traitors and exploitative colonialists who tortured and killed natives? Absolutely. Because they never should have had memorials erected to them in the first place. Ironically, the folks who are freaking out about the eradication of these monuments are often the same people who rage against teaching history the way it actually happened instead of a sanitized version that glosses over the mistreatment of others.
#9
Phantom Phoenix 4 months ago
What would a conspiracy theorist's mind have made of it if Elvis had been brought out of hiding in 2020 to publicly get the covid vaccination?
If that sounds bad, you might be surprised to learn that some even important things are also just lost or destroyed. For example, one other lost item is “The tomb of Alexander the Great, although there are many ongoing excavations right now in Egypt to find it, of course under a nationalist viewpoint.”
#11
The Announcer 4 months ago
Gotta think about your marketability before you get too involved in a societal cause.
#12
RabidChild 4 months ago
Can we use him to replace all the statues of Robert E. Lee? Yeah? Then I'm all in!
“The original manuscripts of the poetry of Sappho, and most Archaic poetry, including plays by Aescylus, Euripides,etc, a whole lot of literature! Which were lost with the Library of Alexandria among other catastrophes in the ancient world,” he shared with Bored Panda.
This wasn’t even the only bit of language we can no longer access. “Tablets in the languages that preceded Greek, namely Minoan, in the Bronze Age. There's only a couple of inscriptions and the famous Linear A and B, though it might have been written as extensively as Babylonian. The first language Linear A has not been deciphered, the second language, Linear B, has only one fully deciphered text.”
Similarly, “Old South Arabian inscriptions. Four entire languages, including Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic and Minean, and Hasaitic. including the ancestors of Arabic and Ethiopia's Ge'ez, all Semitic languages, have only 15,000 inscriptions left. For a comparison, the corpus of Ancient and Byzantine Greek is over 105 million words and some 20,000 inscriptions.”
#20
PFD 4 months ago
This is not true btw (and it should be pretty obvious, really). It's all down to one person's error (that in any case was originally constrained to one location in England in the 13th century) that went viral a few years ago, I think actually after the original author had repudiated it. "In 1986 economist Gregory Clark wrote a working paper that (according to citers) contained this estimate. It doesn't appear he published it, but it got cited. He actually did for real publish a new paper in 2018 raising that number up to an estimate of 250-300 days. That's quite a revision!"
#21
Tucker Cahooter 4 months ago
No doubt it also includes the sentence "I want to speak to the manager!"
“Most Byzantine art during the 4th crusade,” he added, was destroyed by crusaders. “A lot of it is in Italy, but mostly has been lost. For such a long and important period, Byzantine art exists in incredibly small amounts, except for coins.”
#24
Ariom Dahl 4 months ago
I may be a bit of a cynic, but imo that could apply to practically every country in the world.
Remember, in most cases, the things that survive are made from strong, durable materials. “Many of the marble and stone idols we have from the Paleolithic and Neolithic existed in cheaper versions in wood that we assume the poor mass produced and bought (like the Kilia idol or the Neolithic Mother Goddesses). But wood doesn't survive well, the oxidation process eats it up, few examples exist, sometimes preserved in water or in caves,” he shared.
#25
#26
Joey Jo Jo Shabadoo 4 months ago (edited)
Richard Gordon is the first source for this story, as told in his 1983 book "Great Medical Disasters". And even he said it took two and a half minutes, not 25 seconds. How is this ridiculous story still getting passed around? Liston was not Ash from The Evil Dead, chainsawing anything that didnt move fast enough
Interestingly, this even happened in the past. “The 7th century Archaic Greek city of Sybaris, in Calabria, southern Italy, is buried underneath an aquifer, and although the site is known, it cannot be excavated, the site will flood with water within minutes. I worked at the site with a team of artists last year. It was already lost in the 4th century BCE.” If you want to see more of Ari’s work, check out his Instagram and Linktree.
#28
Beak Hookage 4 months ago
Meanwhile Australia: "Hey, can we please be independent?" Britain: "Sure, whatever, run along."
#30
Megalicious 4 months ago
It's completely accurate. We will never erase the damage we did to our indigenous people. Our legacy is shame and horror.
The truth is that without archaeologists taking steps to find and preserve these things, much would be lost. We tend to think of historical artifacts as being hidden in some tombs, but realistically, most were household items that just ended up being thrown out. Tombs, incidentally, are “great” because no one is looting them (for the most part.) It’s important to keep these ideas in mind when thinking about the past. We know a lot about things that are still around, but our minds tend to not fill in the blanks effectively. Picture a medieval street? How colorful is it? Because, in reality, most people would have colored clothes, and yet the concept seems so weird in our eyes. This is probably why memes can do a lot of work to teach people about the past.
#31
Ray Ceeya (RayCeeYa) 4 months ago
Off by about a century or so. This is the Georgian style. The first English people who rolled into America, did so during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Elizabethan, Georgian. Not the same. See for example season 2 of Black Adder vs. Season 3.
#32
LaserBrain 4 months ago
It always strikes me as so funny that guys will put on a funny hat and claim to speak on behalf of the gods... and people actually BELIEVE them
#33
ElfVibratorGlitter 4 months ago (edited)
This is what gets crazy for me. My Oma was from Sekitsch, Yugoslavia...same as my aunts and uncles, I'm from Western Germany. None of these countries exist anymore. And Sekitsch is pretty much a dead language/dialect now, my dad can speak it but who else knows it. (I know it's not that crazy....but meh).
#36
Ray Ceeya (RayCeeYa) 4 months ago
Harriet Tubman, Joan of Arc, Pocahontas, Zheng Yi Sao. Had to look up spelling on the last one.
#42
#44
kitten levels tokyo 4 months ago
I could be the tallest man in the world if I had a 5-foot (1.12345-meter) hat too.
#45
DudeFortitude (He/Him) 4 months ago (edited)
Again, THANK YOU BP for saving me from the scary curse word 😨 I was worried /s
#47
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What do you think ?
Ariom Dahl 4 months ago
If the meme makes one want to know more (and then go and find out more) , it's not entirely useless.
XenoMurph 4 months ago
No, but it's the book they go to that teaches history, not the meme.
Load More Replies...
Crouching hippo hidden panda 4 months ago
Most of this needs fact checking, please do not consider yourselves informed based off memes
Guess Undheit 4 months ago
The ignorant don't want to read because they're lazy. But if you can shock them into realizing a fact, maybe they'll go look it up.
Tom Hutcherson 4 months ago
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but espe
Ariom Dahl 4 months ago
If the meme makes one want to know more (and then go and find out more) , it's not entirely useless.
XenoMurph 4 months ago
No, but it's the book they go to that teaches history, not the meme.
Load More Replies... Crouching hippo hidden panda 4 months ago
Most of this needs fact checking, please do not consider yourselves informed based off memes
Guess Undheit 4 months ago
The ignorant don't want to read because they're lazy. But if you can shock them into realizing a fact, maybe they'll go look it up.
Tom Hutcherson 4 months ago
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but espe
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