- [<] Status Log - created:: 2021-09-26 - status-updated:: 2022-03-18 - current-status:: #articleseed/essay or #articleseed/afterword - [S] Marketing - purpose:: expand out into an article about dietary practices; since it mentions some twitter folks, and links to a bunch of extant articles, it's _probably_ better to do it as an essay, but it can be used as an afterword in a pinch, if it manages to inspire a #storystem/fic - [b] References * [[Josephine Quinn]] * [[Ancient Identities]] * [[50 Information/52 Annotated/In Search of the Phoenicians by Josephine Quinn]] * [[The Amazons by Adrienne Mayor]] * [[Aboriginal oral histories about moth consumption confirmed]] * [[oral traditions are often trustworthy]] * [[2020-11-10 Pigs]] * [[2024-09-19 On feasts, cilantro, and cultural norms around food]] ## Contents - [ ] bring in the notes from Notion - [ ] Find where Joel Baden talked about how a lot of the kosher rules were due to northern/southern Judea cultural practices, i.e. that pigs do well in some environments and not others. THREAD START I'm poking my notes on In Search of the Phoenicians by @josephinequinn & came across this gem: "studying animal bones shows that pork eating went way up from the 5th to 2nd c., tho ancient authors say contact with pigs was forbidden to Phoenicians." A 🧵 👇 --- So the first thing to understand about this is that when we're talking about "ancient authors" in the context of Phoenicia, the Phoenicians had an alphabet but we don't have any longform writing from the Phoenicians. --- This is, ofc, insofar as "the Phoenicians" exist as a clearly defined group, which is its own separate thing that Quinn has devoted an entire book to. The tl;dr is that identity is complicated and the people the ancients called Phoenicians probably didn't self-identify as such. --- Anyway, one of the reasons this bit about pork eating really tickles me me (even tho it's very adjacent to Quinn's actual point) is because I'm forever following the Leviticus threads @JoelBaden posts about how dietary practices are more cultural than logical. --- The idea that a lot of what we think about ancient dietary practices might just ... not be true ... because the people who we generally source information from, i.e. Roman authors, might have just been wrong, is simultaneously hilarious and depressing. --- Generally speaking, I'm deeply interested in how trustworthy ancient sources are, especially elite ones talking about the barbaric practices of their neighbors. Did the people of Carthage really sacrifice babies? IDK, probably? Why? IDK. --- Did some Scythians really roam in all-female bands? Smoke marijuana? IDK, probably. But this bit about pork bones, unlike questions of ritual & society, is pretty straightforward. There's not a ton of room to misinterpret animal bones midden heaps. --- The only thing I love more than archaeology disproving widely-held scholarly tradition is when archaeology proves that native oral traditions were based in reality. The discovery of Troy was a highlight for me. Ditto the work @amayor has done proving "Amazons" existed. --- Really, I just love the intersection between archaeology and communicated history, whether oral or written. Australian aboriginal peoples really did eat moths, just like their oral histories claimed! Anybody got other examples? Particularly from outside the Classical world? THREAD END