What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Listen to a Reconstruction That’s “100% Accurate”

in History, Music | December 6th, 2024

Between 750 BC and 400 BC, the Ancient Greeks com­posed songs meant to be accom­pa­nied by the lyre, reed-pipes, and var­i­ous per­cus­sion instru­ments. More than 2,000 years lat­er, mod­ern schol­ars have final­ly fig­ured out how to recon­struct and per­form these songs with (it’s claimed) 100% accu­ra­cy.

Writ­ing on the BBC web­site, Armand D’An­gour, a musi­cian and tutor in clas­sics at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty, notes:

[Ancient Greek] instru­ments are known from descrip­tions, paint­ings and archae­o­log­i­cal remains, which allow us to estab­lish the tim­bres and range of pitch­es they pro­duced.

And now, new rev­e­la­tions about ancient Greek music have emerged from a few dozen ancient doc­u­ments inscribed with a vocal nota­tion devised around 450 BC, con­sist­ing of alpha­bet­ic let­ters and signs placed above the vow­els of the Greek words.

The Greeks had worked out the math­e­mat­i­cal ratios of musi­cal inter­vals — an octave is 2:1, a fifth 3:2, a fourth 4:3, and so on.

The nota­tion gives an accu­rate indi­ca­tion of rel­a­tive pitch.

So what did Greek music sound like? Below you can lis­ten to David Creese, a clas­si­cist from the Uni­ver­si­ty of New­cas­tle, play­ing “an ancient Greek song tak­en from stone inscrip­tions con­struct­ed on an eight-string ‘canon’ (a zither-like instru­ment) with mov­able bridges. “The tune is cred­it­ed to Seik­i­los,” says Archae­ol­o­gy Mag­a­zine.

For more infor­ma­tion on all of this, read D’An­gour’s arti­cle over at the BBC.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Octo­ber, 2013.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sound­ed Like When Sung in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

Hear Homer’s Ili­ad Read in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

Hear the Old­est Song in the World: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years Ago

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an, the Lan­guage of Mesopotamia

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Scientists Discover that Ancient Egyptians Drank Hallucinogenic Cocktails from 2,300 Year-Old Mug

in History, Religion | December 4th, 2024

Bes mug by USF Insti­tute for Dig­i­tal Explo­ration (IDEx) on Sketch­fab

If ZZ Top have a favorite ancient Egypt­ian deity, that deity is sure­ly Bes, whom the New York Times’ Alexan­der Nazaryan quotes cura­tor and schol­ar Branko van Oppen de Ruiter as call­ing “a beer drinker and a hell-rais­er.” In a paper pub­lished last month in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports, Van Oppen and fif­teen col­lab­o­ra­tors call the row­dy but appar­ent­ly benev­o­lent Bes “one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing and wild­ly pop­u­lar fig­ures of ancient Egypt­ian reli­gion,” and he’s come to mod­ern pub­lic atten­tion thanks to the sub­ject of that paper: a 2,000-year-old cup mold­ed in the shape of his head that has test­ed pos­i­tive for traces of psy­che­del­ic sub­stances — as well as alco­hol and bod­i­ly flu­ids.

Their analy­sis of the mug, a 3D mod­el of which you can exam­ine above, “yield­ed evi­dence of two plants known to have hal­lu­cino­genic prop­er­ties: Syr­i­an rue and the blue water lily,” writes Nazaryan, and it also bore traces of “a fer­ment­ed alco­holic liq­uid derived from fruit,” then sweet­ened with pine nuts, hon­ey, and licorice.

Those were the sorts of ingre­di­ents ancient Egyp­tians had at hand to make the med­i­cine go down — if med­i­cine it was. Nazaryan quotes dig­i­tal archae­ol­o­gist Davide Tanasi, whose lab per­formed the research, cit­ing the traces of sub­stances like blood and breast milk as under­scor­ing that “this is a mag­i­cal potion,” rather than one intend­ed as pure­ly cura­tive.

Bes, as Van Oppen and his col­lab­o­ra­tors write, “emerged from the mag­i­cal realm of the world of demons as a guardian fig­ure,” and by the Roman Impe­r­i­al age “spo­rad­i­cal­ly acquired divine wor­ship.” He “pro­vid­ed pro­tec­tion from dan­ger, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly avert­ing harm” — and also “had a cer­tain regen­er­a­tive impor­tance con­tribut­ing to the ful­fill­ment and hap­pi­ness of fam­i­ly life in all facets of repro­duc­tion, from viril­i­ty and sex­u­al­i­ty, via fer­til­i­ty and fecun­di­ty, to child­birth and growth.” Hence the spec­u­la­tion that women hop­ing to become preg­nant would drink the potion from his head in order to take a psy­che­del­ic jour­ney that would set them on the path to moth­er­hood. That’s hard­ly the most effi­cient means to the end, as we’d see it today, but giv­en the birthrates of increas­ing­ly many soci­eties across the world, we mod­erns may find our­selves in need of Bes’ assis­tance yet.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Gold­en Guide to Hal­lu­cino­genic Plants: Explore the 1977 Illus­trat­ed Guide Cre­at­ed by Harvard’s Ground­break­ing Eth­nob­otanist Richard Evan Schultes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Most Iconic Hip-Hop Sample of Every Year (1973–2023)

in History, Music | November 29th, 2024

Hip-hop was once a sub­cul­ture, but by now it’s long since been one of the unques­tion­ably dom­i­nant forms of pop­u­lar music — not just in Amer­i­ca, and not just among young peo­ple. There are, of course, still a fair few hip-hop hold­outs, but even they’ve come to know a thing or two about it through cul­tur­al osmo­sis alone. They’re aware, for exam­ple — whether or not they approve of it — that rap­pers usu­al­ly per­form over music con­struct­ed through sam­pling: that is, stitched togeth­er out of pieces of oth­er songs. If you’re not sure how it works, you can see the process clear­ly visu­al­ized in the video above from sam­ple provider Track­lib.

Offer­ing a break­down of sam­pling as it’s hap­pened through “fifty years of hip-hop,” the video begins even before the genre real­ly took shape, in 1973. It was then that DJ Kool Herc devel­oped what he called “the ‘Mer­ry-Go-Round’ Tech­nique,” an ear­ly exam­ple of which involved using dual turnta­bles to switch back and forth between the instru­men­tal breaks of James Brown’s “Give It Up or Tur­nit a Loose” and the Incred­i­ble Bon­go Band’s “Bon­go Rock.” The orig­i­nal idea was to give dancers more time to do their thing, but when the MCs picked up their micro­phones and start­ed get­ting cre­ative, a new music took shape almost imme­di­ate­ly.

Main­stream Amer­i­ca got its first taste of hip-hop in 1979, with the release of “Rap­per’s Delight” by the Sug­arhill Gang. In its repeat­ing rhythm part, many would have rec­og­nized Chic’s “Good Times,” which actu­al­ly was­n’t a sam­ple but an inter­po­la­tion, i.e. a re-record­ing. This drew a law­suit — hard­ly the last of its kind in hip-hop — but it also set thou­sands of DJs-to-be dig­ging through their record col­lec­tions in search of usable breaks. Dis­co proved a fount of inspi­ra­tion for ear­ly hip-hop, but so did jazz and even elec­tron­ic music, as demon­strat­ed by Afri­ka Bam­baataa and the Soul Son­ic Force’s “Plan­et Rock,” which sam­pled Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express.”

As sam­pling goes, noth­ing is artis­ti­cal­ly off-lim­its; in some sense, the less imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able, the bet­ter. With the evo­lu­tion of audio edit­ing tech­nol­o­gy, hip-hop artists have long gone even fur­ther in mak­ing these bor­rowed clips their own by slow­ing them down; speed­ing them up; chop­ping them into pieces and rear­rang­ing them; and lay­er­ing them one atop anoth­er. This some­times caus­es prob­lems, as when the dif­fi­cul­ty of licens­ing De La Soul’s many and var­ied source mate­ri­als kept their cat­a­log out of offi­cial avail­abil­i­ty. Along with A Tribe Called Quest, also fea­tured in this video, De La Soul are, of course, known as hip-hop groups beloved by music nerds. But if you seri­ous­ly break down any major work of hip-hop, you’ll find that all its artists are music nerds at heart.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Brief His­to­ry of Sam­pling: From the Bea­t­les to the Beast­ie Boys

How Sam­pling Trans­formed Music and Cre­at­ed New Tapes­tries of Sound: An Inter­ac­tive Demon­stra­tion by Producer/DJ Mark Ron­son

The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6‑Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sam­pling Rev­o­lu­tion

The Sur­pris­ing­ly Long His­to­ry of Auto-Tune, the Vocal-Pro­cess­ing Tech­nol­o­gy Music Crit­ics Love to Hate

Hear Every Sam­ple on the Beast­ie Boys’ Acclaimed Album, Paul’s Bou­tique – and Dis­cov­er Where They Came From

Hear De La Soul’s High­ly Acclaimed & Influ­en­tial Hip-Hop Albums Stream­ing Free for the First Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Explore and Download 14,000+ Woodcuts from Antwerp’s Plantin-Moretus Museum Online Archive

in Archives, Books, Design, History, Museums | November 27th, 2024

We appre­ci­ate illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts and his­tor­i­cal books here on Open Cul­ture, adhere though we do to a much more restrained aes­thet­ic style in our own texts. But that’s not to deny the temp­ta­tion to start this para­graph with one of those over­sized ini­tial let­ters that grew ever larg­er and more elab­o­rate over cen­turies past. The online archive of Antwer­p’s Plan­tin-More­tus Muse­um offers plen­ty of wood­cut Ws to choose from, includ­ing designs sober and bare­ly leg­i­ble, as well as Ws that incor­po­rate a sprout­ing plant, some kind of saint, and even a scene of what looks like impend­ing mur­der.

If you’re not in the mar­ket for fan­cy let­ters, you can also browse the Plan­tin-More­tus wood­cut archive through the cat­e­gories of plants, ani­mals, and sci­ences. Some of these illus­tra­tions are tech­ni­cal, and oth­ers more fan­ci­ful; in cer­tain cas­es, the cen­turies have prob­a­bly ren­dered them less real­is­tic-look­ing than once they were.

Not all the more than 14,000 wood­cuts now in the archive would seem to fit neat­ly in one of those cat­e­gories, but if you take a look at par­tic­u­lar entries, you’ll find that the muse­um has also labeled them with more spe­cif­ic tags, like “clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty,” “map/landscape,” or “aure­ole” (the bright medieval-look­ing halo that marks a fig­ure as holy).

All these wood­cuts, in any case, have been made free to down­load (just click the cloud icon in the upper-right of the win­dow that opens after you click on the image itself) and use as you please. Back in the six­teenth cen­tu­ry, Christophe Plan­tin and Jan More­tus, for whom the Plan­tin-More­tus Muse­um was named, were well-placed to col­lect such things. The Plan­tin-More­tus Muse­um’s web­site describes them as “a rev­o­lu­tion­ary duo.

They were the first print­ers on an indus­tri­al scale — the Steve Jobs and Mark Zucker­berg of their day.” And if these decon­tex­tu­al­ized arti­facts of the print rev­o­lu­tion strike us as a bit strange to us today, just imag­ine how our sur­viv­ing inter­net memes will look four cen­turies hence. Enter the wood­block col­lec­tion here.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load 215,000 Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters Span­ning the Tradition’s 350-Year His­to­ry

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

Stephen Fry Takes Us Inside the Sto­ry of Johannes Guten­berg & the First Print­ing Press

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

Clas­sic Films and Film­mak­ers, Ren­dered in Wood­cut By a Los Ange­les Artist-Cinephile

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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How Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon Became the First Sci-Fi Film & Changed Cinema Forever (1902)

in Film, History | November 26th, 2024

If you hap­pen to vis­it the Ciné­math­èque Française in Paris, do take the time to see the Musée Méliès locat­ed inside it. Ded­i­cat­ed to la Magie du ciné­ma, it con­tains arti­facts from through­out the his­to­ry of film-as-spec­ta­cle, which includes such pic­tures as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Run­ner. Its focus on the evo­lu­tion of visu­al effects guar­an­tees a cer­tain promi­nence to sci­ence fic­tion, which, as a genre of “the sev­enth art,” has its ori­gins in France: specif­i­cal­ly, in the work of the muse­um’s name­sake Georges Méliès, whose A Trip to the Moon (Le voy­age dans la lune) from 1902 we now rec­og­nize as the very first sci-fi movie.

Every­one has seen at least one image from A Trip to the Moon: that of the land­ing cap­sule crashed into the irri­tat­ed man-on-the-moon’s eye. But if you watch the film at its full length — which, in the ver­sion above, runs about fif­teen min­utes — you can bet­ter under­stand its impor­tance to the devel­op­ment of cin­e­ma.

For Méliès did­n’t pio­neer just a genre, but also a range of tech­niques that expand­ed the visu­al vocab­u­lary of his medi­um. Take the approach to the moon (played by the direc­tor him­self) imme­di­ate­ly before the land­ing, a kind of shot nev­er before seen in those days of prac­ti­cal­ly immo­bile movie cam­eras — and one that neces­si­tat­ed real tech­ni­cal inven­tive­ness to pull off.

What some­one watch­ing A Trip to the Moon in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry will first notice, of course, is less the ways in which it feels famil­iar than the ways in which it does­n’t. In an era when the­ater was still the dom­i­nant form of enter­tain­ment, Méliès adhered to the­atri­cal forms of stag­ing: he uses few cuts, and prac­ti­cal­ly no vari­ety in the cam­era angles. It would hard­ly seem worth not­ing that a film from 1902 is silent and in black-and-white, but what few know is that col­orized prints — labo­ri­ous­ly hand-paint­ed, frame by frame, on an assem­bly line — exist­ed even at the time of its orig­i­nal release; one such restored ver­sion appears just above.

In truth, Méliès opened up much deep­er pos­si­bil­i­ties for cin­e­ma than most of us acknowl­edge. As point­ed out in the A Mat­ter of Film video above, the motion pic­tures made before this amount­ed to exhibits of dai­ly life: impres­sive as tech­no­log­i­cal demon­stra­tions (and, so the leg­end goes, har­row­ing for the view­ers of 1896, who feared a train approach­ing onscreen would run them over), but noth­ing as nar­ra­tives. Like Méliès’ oth­er work, A Trip to the Moon proved that a movie could tell a sto­ry. It also proved some­thing more cen­tral to the medi­um’s pow­er: that it could tell that sto­ry in such a way that its images linger more than 120 years lat­er, even when the details of what hap­pens have long since lost their inter­est.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Art of Cre­at­ing Spe­cial Effects in Silent Movies: Inge­nu­ity Before the Age of CGI

Watch 194 Films by Georges Méliès, the Film­mak­er Who “Invent­ed Every­thing” (All in Chrono­log­i­cal Order)

The First Hor­ror Film, Georges Méliès’ The Haunt­ed Cas­tle (1896)

Watch Georges Méliès’ The Drey­fus Affair, the Con­tro­ver­sial Film Cen­sored by the French Gov­ern­ment for 50 Years (1899)

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Isaac Newton Creates a List of His 57 Sins (Circa 1662)

in History, Physics, Religion, Science | November 25th, 2024

Sir Isaac New­ton, arguably the most impor­tant and influ­en­tial sci­en­tist in his­to­ry, dis­cov­ered the laws of motion and the uni­ver­sal force of grav­i­ty. For the first time ever, the rules of the uni­verse could be described with the supreme­ly ratio­nal lan­guage of math­e­mat­ics. Newton’s ele­gant equa­tions proved to be one of the inspi­ra­tions for the Enlight­en­ment, a shift away from the God-cen­tered dog­ma of the Church in favor of a world­view that placed rea­son at its cen­ter. The many lead­ers of the Enlight­en­ment turned to deism if not out­right athe­ism. But not New­ton.

In 1936, a doc­u­ment of Newton’s dat­ing from around 1662 was sold at a Sothe­by’s auc­tion and even­tu­al­ly wound up at the Fitzwilliam Muse­um in Cam­bridge, Eng­land. The Fitzwilliam Man­u­script has long been a source of fas­ci­na­tion for New­ton schol­ars. Not only does the note­book fea­ture a series of increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult math­e­mat­i­cal prob­lems but also a cryp­tic string of let­ters read­ing:

Nabed Efy­hik
Wfn­zo Cpm­fke

If you can solve this, there are some peo­ple in Cam­bridge who would like to talk to you.

But what makes the doc­u­ment real­ly inter­est­ing is how incred­i­bly per­son­al it is. New­ton rat­tles off a laun­dry list of sins he com­mit­ted dur­ing his rel­a­tive­ly short life – he was around 20 when he wrote this, still a stu­dent at Cam­bridge. He splits the list into two cat­e­gories, before Whit­sun­day 1662 and after. (Whit­sun­day is, by the way, the Sun­day of the feast of Whit­sun, which is cel­e­brat­ed sev­en weeks after East­er.) Why he decid­ed on that par­tic­u­lar date to bifur­cate his time­line isn’t imme­di­ate­ly clear.

Some of the sins are rather opaque. I’m not sure what, for instance, “Mak­ing a feath­er while on Thy day” means exact­ly but it sure sounds like a long-lost euphemism. Oth­er sins like “Peev­ish­ness with my moth­er” are imme­di­ate­ly relat­able as good old-fash­ioned teenage churl­ish­ness. You can see the full list below. And you can read the full doc­u­ment over at the New­ton Project here.

Before Whit­sun­day 1662

1. Vsing the word (God) open­ly
2. Eat­ing an apple at Thy house
3. Mak­ing a feath­er while on Thy day
4. Deny­ing that I made it.
5. Mak­ing a mouse­trap on Thy day
6. Con­triv­ing of the chimes on Thy day
7. Squirt­ing water on Thy day
8. Mak­ing pies on Sun­day night
9. Swim­ming in a kim­nel on Thy day
10. Putting a pin in Iohn Keys hat on Thy day to pick him.
11. Care­less­ly hear­ing and com­mit­ting many ser­mons
12. Refus­ing to go to the close at my moth­ers com­mand.
13. Threat­ning my father and moth­er Smith to burne them and the house over them
14. Wish­ing death and hop­ing it to some
15. Strik­ing many
16. Hav­ing uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.
17. Steal­ing cher­ry cobs from Eduard Stor­er
18. Deny­ing that I did so
19. Deny­ing a cross­bow to my moth­er and grand­moth­er though I knew of it
20. Set­ting my heart on mon­ey learn­ing plea­sure more than Thee
21. A relapse
22. A relapse
23. A break­ing again of my covenant renued in the Lords Sup­per.
24. Punch­ing my sis­ter
25. Rob­bing my moth­ers box of plums and sug­ar
26. Call­ing Dorothy Rose a jade
27. Glutiny in my sick­ness.
28. Peev­ish­ness with my moth­er.
29. With my sis­ter.
30. Falling out with the ser­vants
31. Divers com­mis­sions of alle my duties
32. Idle dis­course on Thy day and at oth­er times
33. Not turn­ing near­er to Thee for my affec­tions
34. Not liv­ing accord­ing to my belief
35. Not lov­ing Thee for Thy self.
36. Not lov­ing Thee for Thy good­ness to us
37. Not desir­ing Thy ordi­nances
38. Not long {long­ing} for Thee in {illeg}
39. Fear­ing man above Thee
40. Vsing unlaw­ful means to bring us out of dis­tress­es
41. Car­ing for world­ly things more than God
42. Not crav­ing a bless­ing from God on our hon­est endeav­ors.
43. Miss­ing chapel.
44. Beat­ing Arthur Stor­er.
45. Peev­ish­ness at Mas­ter Clarks for a piece of bread and but­ter.
46. Striv­ing to cheat with a brass halfe crowne.
47. Twist­ing a cord on Sun­day morn­ing
48. Read­ing the his­to­ry of the Chris­t­ian cham­pi­ons on Sun­day

Since Whit­sun­day 1662

49. Glu­tony
50. Glu­tony
51. Vsing Wil­fords tow­el to spare my own
52. Neg­li­gence at the chapel.
53. Ser­mons at Saint Marys (4)
54. Lying about a louse
55. Deny­ing my cham­ber­fel­low of the knowl­edge of him that took him for a sot.
56. Neglect­ing to pray 3
57. Help­ing Pet­tit to make his water watch at 12 of the clock on Sat­ur­day night

via JF Ptak Sci­ence Books/Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1704, Isaac New­ton Pre­dict­ed That the World Will End in 2060

Isaac New­ton The­o­rized That the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Revealed the Tim­ing of the Apoc­a­lypse: See His Burnt Man­u­script from the 1680s

Isaac Newton’s Recipe for the Myth­i­cal ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ Is Being Dig­i­tized & Put Online (Along with His Oth­er Alche­my Man­u­scripts)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. 

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How Rasputin Inspired the “Fictitious Persons” Disclaimer Commonly Seen in Movies

in Film, History, Law | November 25th, 2024

“This is a work of fic­tion,” declares the dis­claimer we’ve all noticed dur­ing the end cred­its of movies. “Any sim­i­lar­i­ty to actu­al per­sons, liv­ing or dead, or actu­al events, is pure­ly coin­ci­den­tal.” In most cas­es, this may seem so triv­ial that it hard­ly mer­its a men­tion, but the very same dis­claimer also rolls up after pic­tures very clear­ly intend­ed to rep­re­sent actu­al events or per­sons, liv­ing or dead. Most of us would write it all off as one more absur­di­ty cre­at­ed by the elab­o­rate pan­tomime of Amer­i­can legal cul­ture, but a clos­er look at its his­to­ry reveals a much more intrigu­ing ori­gin.

As told in the Ched­dar video above, the sto­ry begins with Rasputin and the Empress, a 1932 Hol­ly­wood movie about the tit­u­lar real-life mys­tic and his involve­ment with the court of Nicholas II, the last emper­or of Rus­sia. Hav­ing been killed in 1916, Rasputin him­self was­n’t around to get liti­gious about his vil­lain­ous por­tray­al (by no less a per­former than Lionel Bar­ry­more, inci­den­tal­ly, act­ing along­side his sib­lings John and Ethel as the prince and cza­ri­na). It was actu­al­ly one of Rasputin’s sur­viv­ing killers, an exiled aris­to­crat named Felix Yusupov, who sued MGM, accus­ing them of defam­ing his wife, Princess Iri­na Yusupov, in the form of the char­ac­ter Princess Natasha.

The film casts Princess Natasha as a sup­port­er of Rasputin, writes Slate’s Dun­can Fyfe, “but the mys­tic, wary of her hus­band, hyp­no­tizes and rapes her, ren­der­ing Natasha — by his log­ic, with which she agrees — unfit to be a wife. Yusupov con­tend­ed that as view­ers would equate Chegodi­eff with Yusupov, so would they link Natasha with Iri­na,” though in real­i­ty Iri­na and Rasputin nev­er even met. In an Eng­lish court, “the jury found in her favor, award­ing her £25,000, or about $125,000. MGM had to take the film out of cir­cu­la­tion for decades and purge the offend­ing scene for all time,” though a small piece of it remains in Rasputin and the Empress’ orig­i­nal trail­er.

Things might have gone in MGM’s favor had the film not includ­ed a title card announc­ing that “a few of the char­ac­ters are still alive — the rest met death by vio­lence.” The stu­dio was advised that they’d have done well to declare the exact oppo­site, a prac­tice soon imple­ment­ed across Hol­ly­wood. It did­n’t take long for the movies to start hav­ing fun with it, intro­duc­ing jokey vari­a­tions on the soon-famil­iar boil­er­plate. Less than a decade after Rasputin and the Empress, one non­sen­si­cal musi­cal com­e­dy pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) opened with the dis­claimer that “any sim­i­lar­i­ty between HELLZAPOPPIN’ and a motion pic­ture is pure­ly coin­ci­den­tal” — a tra­di­tion more recent­ly upheld by South Park.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Romanovs’ Last Ball Brought to Life in Col­or Pho­tographs (1903)

Watch an 8‑Part Film Adap­ta­tion of Tolstoy’s Anna Karen­i­na Free Online

Watch the Huge­ly Ambi­tious Sovi­et Film Adap­ta­tion of War and Peace Free Online (1966–67)

An Intro­duc­tion to Ivan Ilyin, the Philoso­pher Behind the Author­i­tar­i­an­ism of Putin’s Rus­sia & West­ern Far Right Move­ments

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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How the Ancient Romans Traveled Without Maps

in History, Maps, Travel | November 22nd, 2024

In an age when many of us could hard­ly make our way to an unfa­mil­iar gro­cery store with­out rely­ing on a GPS nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem, we might well won­der how the Romans could estab­lish and sus­tain their mighty empire with­out so much as a prop­er map. That’s the ques­tion addressed by the His­to­ria Mil­i­tum video above, “How Did Ancient Peo­ple Trav­el With­out Maps?” Or more to the point, how did they trav­el with­out scaled maps — that is, ones “in which the map’s dis­tances were pro­por­tion­al to their actu­al size in the real world,” like almost all those we con­sult on our screens today?

The sur­viv­ing maps from the ancient Roman world tend not to take great pains adher­ing to true geog­ra­phy. Yet as the Roman Empire expand­ed, lay­ing roads across three con­ti­nents, more and more Romans engaged in long-dis­tance trav­el, and for the most part seem to have arrived at their intend­ed des­ti­na­tions.

To do so, they used not maps per se but “itin­er­aries,” which tex­tu­al­ly list­ed towns and cities along the way and the dis­tance between them. By the fourth cen­tu­ry, “all main Roman roads along with 225 stop­ping sta­tions were com­piled in a doc­u­ment called the Itin­er­ar­i­um Antoni­ni, the Itin­er­ary of Emper­or Anto­nius Pius.”

This high­ly prac­ti­cal doc­u­ment includes most­ly roads that “passed through large cities, which pro­vid­ed bet­ter facil­i­ties for hous­ing, shop­ping, bathing, and oth­er trav­el­er needs.” With this infor­ma­tion, “a trav­el­er could copy the spe­cif­ic dis­tances and sta­tions they need­ed to reach their des­ti­na­tion.” Still today, some sev­en­teen cen­turies lat­er, “most peo­ple would­n’t use a paper scaled map for trav­el, but would instead break their jour­ney down into a list of sub­way sta­tions, bus stops, and inter­sec­tions.” And if you were to attempt to dri­ve across Europe, mak­ing a mod­ern-day Roman Empire road trip, you’d almost cer­tain­ly rely on the dis­tances and points of inter­est pro­vid­ed by the syn­the­sized voice read­ing aloud from the vast Itin­er­ar­i­um Antoni­ni of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Map Show­ing How the Ancient Romans Envi­sioned the World in 40 AD

The Largest Ear­ly Map of the World Gets Assem­bled for the First Time: See the Huge, Detailed & Fan­tas­ti­cal World Map from 1587

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Down­load 131,000 His­toric Maps from the Huge David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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