I wish it was easy for people to take rape accusations seriously I spent an entire calendar year fighting to get a serial rapist to face consequences (not even legal ones) and nothing of consequence happened beyond the fallout of how the accusation was laid. stop posting like mere accusations ruin lives
either a rape accusation is quietly brushed aside or it is used as an excuse to attack someone for other deeper reasons (e.g. racism) but never is the sexual assault by itself actually taken seriously
There's no way to have a "who has it worse" oppression Olympics argument without it turning chauvinistic. Dropping dialectical materialism just to score points online isn't exactly a great way to win people over. Is the halfway point just a dead end nowadays? Have we traded our principles for cheap gotchas?
Truth be told, for you losers, it's easy to say Russians have it worse or Indigenous Americans have it worse when you're neither. You're comfortable treating whole groups of people like tokens in a debate because you're not the one getting hurt. It's easy to make those arguments when you don't have to live with the consequences.
Maybe we all need to take a step back and start thinking about how to lead everyone I mean everyone toward some kind of respite from a world that's increasingly divided by the false notions of nationality and ethnicity.
Not for nothing but one hundred percent of people who dismiss classic literature because it was written by dead white guys also write far below the mark of those dead white guys.
Filmmakers have the right to adapt academic output for their medium. Academics have the right to criticise how it's done, and the biases betrayed by the execution. Emily Wilson's review of The Odyssey is an excellent addition to the discourse around this film, and how American industry valorises certain character and narrative arcs. Though Nolan's film is largely accepted as a critique, it still sits neatly in his oeuvre of great, but tortured and ahistorically moral, frontier men.
I especially hope that people take the time to digest her penultimate paragraph:
The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt.
— An Uncomplicated Man by Emily Wilson (London Review of Books)
The decision to shoot in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, where the Indigenous people can’t tell their stories without fear of imprisonment
The simple act of holding a camera in my homeland of Western Sahara can be a crime. When Sahrawi film-makers and journalists attempt to document everyday life under Moroccan occupation, they can often end up in prison cells. For the Moroccan regime, a camera in the hands of a Sahrawi threatens its official narrative that Western Sahara is part of Morocco.
In contrast, when celebrated international names in the film industry wish to capture an ideal picture for an epic journey, and decide that our land is exotic enough to shoot the desired scenes, they are welcomed, escorted and granted access by the same authorities that usually deny us that right.
This is the bitter and paradoxical reality in Western Sahara, an occupied territory with many material and immaterial riches. While foreign extractors of all kinds freely plunder Western Sahara’s phosphate minerals, sand, fish, and tomatoes, and commodify our winds, sunlight and picturesque desert landscapes, we the Indigenous Sahrawis are becoming a minority in our own homeland, systematically marginalised, silenced and denied access to the land we roamed as nomads for centuries.
The latest episode of this colonial drama stars the Christopher Nolan blockbuster using parts of our occupied territory as a film set. Sahrawis are aghast that scenes from The Odyssey – an adaptation of Homer’s poem immersed in themes of displacement, family separation, betrayal, and the agonising, decades-long struggle to return home – were shot on our lands. The irony would be comical were it not so tragic: we, the Sahrawi people whose land was used to film parts of the Odyssey, have been living our own brutal odyssey for more than 50 years.
— Mohamed Sleiman Labat
Despite the MAGA overreaction to the bold casting choices in what was bound to be a relatively conservative film, it was Donald Trump that made this colonial backdrop possible:
The Odyssey is the first major Hollywood production to shoot scenes in Western Sahara. This would have been unthinkable prior to 2020, when President Donald Trump broke with decades of US foreign policy and recognized Morocco’s illegally established sovereignty over the territory. The decision was part of a quid pro quo in exchange for Morocco’s normalization of ties with Israel. Now Nolan and crew’s four-day shoot in Dakhla illustrates how quickly Hollywood studios have moved to exploit the opportunities created by Trump’s transactional diplomacy. This subsidized occupation cinema is yet another symptom of the breakdown of whatever remained of a rules-based liberal order.
For Moroccan officials, the presence of The Odyssey crew was a propaganda coup. They have made it clear they see it as just the beginning of Dakhla’s development as a base for international film productions. This is despite the fact that the wider Western Sahara remains the site of an ongoing armed conflict between the country’s military and the Sahrawi pro-independence movement, the Polisario Front. Last month, three Polisario fighters were killed in a Moroccan drone attack close to the 2,700-kilometer sand berm that separates Moroccan-controlled territory from the desert areas held by Polisario.
— Odyssey to Africa’s last colony by Eoghan Gilmartin
i think it's really great that we've associated any and all feminism that is even a smidge deeper than "women are so hecking cool" with white cis american women. I think it's awesome that I basically always have to be on guard for being called white whenever I post about misogyny being a real, observable societal force that impacts my life and lives of all women every fucking day and not, as popular perception would tell you, a vague, ill-defined concept that has no real bearing or impact on our existence. I'm so glad misogyny is recognized among self-proclaimed leftists as a lesser oppression, something that is only ever taken seriously by evil privileged white woman. and of course this all has nothing to do with how we interact with and treat feminists of color or transfeminists or feminists not from the imperial core and all the other additionally marginalized feminist women.
Even in left wing circles it’s literally like pulling teeth trying to get people to take misogyny seriously as a real problem that is killing women and ruining their lives everywhere all the time and not like a haha silly 1950s problem we just make jokes about now
Dove-Shaped Perfume Vessels from Ancient Rome, c.50 CE: these glass vessels were filled with scented oils or cosmetic powders and then sealed, meaning that their contents could only be accessed by breaking the dove's neck or tail
These bottles were created and used as unguentaria (otherwise known as balsamaria) which are ancient vessels that were typically filled with scented oils, cosmetic powders, balms, or ointments. Unguentaria could be crafted from ceramic, glass, or stone, and they came in various shapes and sizes, but dove-shaped vessels made of glass were especially popular during the second half of the 1st century CE, when they were produced and distributed throughout the Roman Empire.
Above: a dove-shaped unguentarium with residue from the original contents still visible inside
Each bottle was crafted from blown-glass that was carefully modeled into the shape of a bird; the inner cavity was then filled with perfume or cosmetic powder, and the tip of the tail was reheated and compressed, effectively sealing the vessel.
Above: dove-shaped vessels that were opened and emptied long ago, c.50-100 CE
As this article explains:
The vessels were produced with glass blowing pipes by so-called "free blowing," and are for this reason extremely thin-walled, with body thicknesses significantly below 0.1 cm.
After the containers had been filled, the tail feathers were sealed airtight by reheating to protect the contents from moisture. Parts of the containers, such as the head or tail feathers, had to be broken off in order to access the contents of the vessels, which means that they were disposable packaging.
Above: vessels with the tips of their tails broken off
Most of these bottles were made from clear or pale blue Roman glass, but some were crafted with a dark blue, green, purple, or yellow appearance instead:
As cheap, mass-produced goods, the packaging consisted mainly of the conventional thin-walled and transparent Roman glass with an unintentional light blue colouring. Specimens made of intentionally coloured transparent glass (e.g. dark blue, dark green, violet or yellow) are less common. This may also have to do with the fact that the pink or white contents could be visually better distinguished and marketed if the vessels were made of the conventional Roman glass, which offered more transparency to the beholder than the intentionally coloured glass.
Above: a sealed unguentarium that likely contains scented oils and cosmetic residue, from Rovesenda, Italy, c.50 CE
Research suggests that many of these bottles were filled with powder, including pink substances that have been described as "blush" or "rouge," while others were filled with liquid.
Above: more dove-shaped unguentaria from the Roman Empire
Vessels with this design (which is also known as Isings form 11) have been unearthed at Roman-era sites located throughout Europe:
Evidence shows that these glass containers were widely marketed in the Roman Empire. The main areas of distribution are the central and northern Italian regions of Campania et Latium, Venetia et Histria, and Transpadana, along with the northwestern provinces of Gallia Belgica, Gallia Lugdunensis, Germania inferior and Germania superior [in what is now Italy, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands].
There is also evidence from the Balkan and Danube region in the provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia, and also from the eastern Mediterranean in the provinces of Achaea, Creta et Cyrenae and Macedonia. The distribution in the western Mediterranean seems to be limited to Hispania Tarraconensis.
Above: the severed heads of two bird-shaped unguentaria
Sources & More Info:
Glassware and Glassworking in Thessaloniki: 1st Century BC-6th Century AD: Bird-Shaped Inguentaria (Isings Form 11)
The Austrian Archaeological Institute: New Finds of Bird-Shaped Glass Vessels with Residues of their Former Content
The British Museum: Roman Perfume Bottle in the Shape of a Bird
Società Friulana di Archeologia: Glass Doves and Globes from Thessaloniki: North Italian Imports or Local Products?
Analytical Chemistry for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage: Compositional Analysis of Greco-Roman Unguentaria Residues
Metropolitan Museum of Art: Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Bird
Just curious but where does the star on cheek motif come from in Ancient Greece? It’s beautiful but I don’t know what it’s called so I can’t google it effectively and ‘star on cheek ancient Greece’ did not net me much. If you have any resources on this I would love to read them!
I'm not sure if there's an actual term for it, but the main (and perhaps only) point of reference that everyone seems to use is this painted plaster head of a woman from Mycenae c. 12th century BCE (National Archaeological Museum Athens inv. 4575). it's a unique and pretty unusual object for the period, but apparently there are a couple of other (less well-preserved or less impressive) examples of women's faces depicted with these red suns/stars/rosettes on their cheeks and chins in Mycenaean art. there's some thought that it might be a representation of some sort of makeup worn by real women in late Bronze Age Mycenae, potentially royalty and/or priestesses in official ritual contexts. alternatively it could be an artistic marker of divinity or non-human status with absolutely no relation to women's appearances in real life, since this head may have belonged to a statue of a goddess or a sphinx. we do have a decent number of Mycenaean wall painting fragments depicting female figures, and I don't believe any of them have these markings on their faces-- the trend of depicting mythic or historical Bronze Age Greek women like this really does seem to all come back to this one object.
Hey, jumping in to add some resources - during my archaeology degree I focused specifically on Late Bronze Age (LBA) Aegean dress & adornment, so while I'm not at all an expert I've got a pretty good grasp of current research.
Answering the first question, the term you're looking for is 'rosette', or more specifically - depending on the academic - 'dot-rosette'. This was a common LBA iconographic motif in the Near East & Aegean, depicted on a variety of materials; from ceramics to textiles, architecture, metalwork, jewellery, stone carving, etc etc. These depictions could be simple & stylised, more realistic/flower-like, or even quite sophisticated and complex - the dot style seen on NAM.4575 (the plaster head that OP linked & pictured above) being on the simpler, more stylised side.
It, as OP pointed out, is a very singular object for the LBA. Not only is NAM.4575 a large scale three dimensional human figure, but it has so much surviving pigment!! As per gendered iconographic norms (e.g. skin colour) for the LBA Aegean it clearly depicts a female, however there is debate over the specifics depicted. Is she real or divine, human or mystical? It certainly comes from religious context, excavated in the Cult Centre of Mycenae, and the headdress she wears (known as a Polos) has strong links to ritual practice. Worn by (likely) goddesses, mortal figures of high religious or social significance (e.g. priestesses), as well as sphinxes (but not exclusively! older scholarship skewed towards majority sphinxes but our understanding of Poloi wearers has improved over time and tbh there are more occurrences of being worn by human/human-like divinities than by a sphinx). This led to the initial identification of NAM.4575 as a sphinx, however more recent consensus in scholarship interprets her (IMO more correctly) as a goddess or mortal woman of high ritual/social status. Either way, wherever she falls on the mortal/divine divide, it is clear NAM.4575's facial markings hold some form of ritual function for high status women.
However, as mentioned briefly by OP, she is not the sole depiction of facial rosettes from the archaeological record - similar markings *do* appear occasionally elsewhere.
Brief Overview of Rosette facial markings within the archaeological material:
Earlier examples of painted facial rosettes (as well as so many other simple designs) can be seen on some Early Cycladic Figures, such as this EC II marble female head from Keros pictured below on the left, displayed at the Karlsruhe Badisches Landesmuseum (inv.70/550). While the condition of the figure's pigment has deteriorated, traces of pigment on the cheeks and chin in a dot-rosette pattern can still be seen.
More contemporary with NAM.4575 both in time (LBA) and location (found within the Mycenae Cult Center complex) is MM.294, a LH IIIB2 ceramic female figurine. As can clearly be seen in the middle picture below (taken by me at the Archaeological Museum of Mycenae) two facial dot-rosettes are detailed, with one on each cheek. They are less sophisticated then those seen on the plaster head, unsurprising with the differences in material and quality between the two artefacts. Other body markings are also present.
Another LBA dot-rosette example can be seen on CMS II 052, a LM I hematite seal stone now located in the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion. While not depicted explicitly on a human face, the seal consists of 4 'floating' objects isolated from any background - an eye, ear, and two dot-rosettes. CMS II 052 (pictured below right) therefore provides evidence of an explicit association of dot-rosettes with other human facial features.
With the explicit proviso I have yet to find scholarly discussion regarding a link to facial markings specifically (unsurprising with how extremely niche of a subtopic this is), through my own research I've found some fragmentary examples of apparent facial dot-rosette markings on phi Φ type figurines. As currently for many phi Φ types no comprehensive pigment analysis exists, or if undertaken most technical reports are not publicly available, so my interpretation of painted facial markings cannot at this stage be definitively confirmed. This identification is instead based solely on visual surveying of available material, with some examples seemingly depicting dot-rosette facial markings that have degraded due to pigment loss over time. One such example is below, a LH III phi Φ type grave good from Tanagra, now displayed in the Archaeological Museum of Thebes (where this picture was taken, by me). On the figurine's left cheek two dots are visible, potentially once part of a larger dot-rosette motif (especially considering pigment loss is evident elsewhere on the figure).
Facial Markings more generally in the archaeological record:
Looking not *just* at dot-rosettes but more broadly at the practice of facial markings in the LBA Aegean there is a greater body of evidence. They appear within a larger variety of contexts, depicted on votive offerings, grave goods, religious objects, and as artistic imagery within high status urban complexes, domestic spaces, peak sanctuaries, and even rock shelters. Notably, while many of these depictions may hold ritual purposes they are represented not just on goddesses but also on explicitly confirmed non-divine women (in fact, I'd argue the majority are mortal rather than divine). This suggests that facial markings were practised by real LBA women in the Aegean, albeit likely not as common, everyday practice for majority of the population. At current, there is no absolute consensus on whether this was achieved by temporary cosmetics (most likely?), tattooing, scarification, or some other method with a variety of generally simple geometric designs depicted within the archaeological record.
The simplest design of facial markings - red, blush-like circular blobs on the cheeks - can be seen on multiple frescoes, see below pictured examples of women within the House of the Ladies Fresco from LBA Akrotiri, Thera; as well as another female plaster head from Mycenae, the smaller and more damaged NAM.7712 pictured below right.
Simple cheek circle markings are also represented on other figurines such as ceramic head AMH.Î 1102 from Agious Antonios (pictured below left & centre), or on this stunning clay woman's head found at the Pisokephalo peak sanctuary, with a very distinct red pigmented mark on her left cheek (pictured below right, taken by me at the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion)
Diamond facial marks also occurred, evident on a few terracotta Mycenaean figures, MM.320 (left) and MM.1552 (right), both images taken at the Archaeology Museum of Mycenae by me
A favourite of mine from Agia Triada, the fragmentary AHM.Î 3085 shows unique fragmentary forehead marks of concentric semi or full circles. (below left taken by me at the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion)
Appearing significantly more frequently are depictions of (painted?) red ears, for example seen in the West House Priestess Fresco from Akrotiri (below right taken by me at the Prehistoric Museum of Thira)
The above examples of facial markings designs are not exhaustive, but with many of the remaining extant designs being unique and/or in poor condition I've tried to only discuss those that are of most relevance.
Of these examples, majority come from secure religious contexts and while some could potentially depict divinity, many can also be ruled out as not depicting goddesses at all - but rather real women. While most likely these would be high ranking priestesses, worshippers, holders of some other specific ritual function, or otherwise high status individuals (rather than the average woman) it is clear that some form of cosmetic facial marks were practised by some LBA women. The rarity of depictions likely means these markings held a specific ritual or social meaning no longer evident today. Regarding rosettes specifically, it was a much more widespread motif in textiles, art, architecture, and jewellery then depicted as a facial marking, however several examples *do* exist - with NAM.4575 being the most spectacular and well known.
For more in depth discussion and research on rosettes and/or facial markings within the LBA Aegean I've listed a few articles in the readmore below. I've tried to only add ones that are freely available online, but for the ones that aren't feel free to dm for pdf copies. All imagery not taken by me are from publicly available sources (wikimedia commons, the Arachne CMS database, open access publications, and online museum digital collections)
Further reading:
Blakolmer, H. 2012 ‘Body Marks and Textile Ornaments in Aegean Iconography: Their Meaning and Symbolism’ in KOSMOS ed. Nosh and Laffineur.
Earle, J. 2012 ‘Cosmetics and Cult Practices in the Bronze Age Aegean? A Case Study of Women with Red Ears’ in KOSMOS ed. Nosh and Laffineur.
Nicolakaki-Kentrou, M. 2007 'Artists exchanging vocabularies: the dot-rosette motif on ceramics and textiles of the 2nd millennium BC in Egypt and the Aegean' in Mediterranean Crossroads. ed. Antoniaou and Pace.
Palaiologu, H. 2015 'A Female Painted Plaster Figure from Mycenae' in Mycenaean Wall Painting in Context. New Discoveries, Old Finds Reconsidered. ed. Brecoulaki, Davis, and Stoker.
Rehak, P. 2005 'The 'Sphinx' Head from the Cult Center at Mycenae'. British Archaeological Reports.
i'm sorry there is no way that many of you have read the Odyssey and give a fuck about the Homeric epics and iron and bronze age settlements in the ancient Mediterranean. Shut up.
You can report suspected or confirmed IDF war criminals to the Hind Rajab Foundation, and they will try to get the war criminal's country of residence to follow international law by prosecuting them
Every so often i see Yank recipes on the internet and so many of them litterly have no vegetables. None. Meat and carbs and some powdered spices. Its no wonder you people only shit once a week and constantly complain about constipation. Little fiber packet are not going to save you if this is your median recipe.
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