A certain notion that frequently shows up in popular culture and online claims that everyone in the premodern world all had absolutely disgusting, crooked, and totally rotten teeth. There is some truth to this perception. Modern orthodontic practice did not exist in the premodern world, so the majority of people probably did not have perfectly straight teeth. Additionally, across the board, most people in the premodern world generally had poorer dental hygiene than what is considered normal in most western developed countries in the twenty-first century. Some premodern people did indeed have extremely disgusting, disease-ridden, and rotten teeth.
Nonetheless, the popular perception ignores a great deal of contravening evidence. Some premodern people had naturally straight teeth, just as some people do today, and perfectly straight teeth with no gaps haven’t necessarily always been seen as desirable in all cultures. Additionally, premodern people did have an interest in keeping their teeth clean and they had methods of cleaning their teeth, albeit ones that are not as effective as those in widespread use today.
Finally, most premodern people’s teeth were not all totally rotted and falling out due primarily to the fact that they rarely or never consumed simple sugars, which are the primary cause of most tooth decay today. People who lived in areas close to the sea also tended to eat lots of seafood, which is high in fluoride, which may have helped to protect their teeth. Consequently, some ancient and medieval people actually had relatively nice-looking, healthy teeth even by twenty-first-century standards.
The prevalence of non-perfectly-aligned teeth in the premodern world
Modern orthodontics did not exist in the ancient or medieval worlds. Orthodontic braces, headgear, palatal expanders, and retainers did not exist. Consequently, the majority of people in premodern times most likely had teeth that were not perfectly in accordance with modern western dental aesthetic norms, which hold that teeth should be perfectly aligned and close together.
That being said, we know that some people did have naturally straight teeth, in the same way that some people today have naturally straight teeth without ever needing braces or other orthodontic treatment. Even among people who did have misaligned teeth, the degree of misalignment almost certainly varied considerably, with some people having more or less crooked teeth than others.
This, however, gets to a deeper issue. Twenty-first-century western culture usually portrays teeth that do not fit its aesthetic norms as ugly and most modern people have been taught to view them this way. Not all cultures throughout history, however, have necessarily shared the same normative view of what teeth should look like.
Notably, even today, despite the pervasive influence of western aesthetic norms, in some West African countries such as Nigeria and Ghana, it is widely regarded as highly attractive for a person to have a gap between their two front teeth, to such an extent that some people who don’t naturally have gap teeth have had orthodontists give them treatments to give them tooth gaps.
Even within a single culture, attitudes about which kinds of teeth are aesthetically pleasing or attractive can vary. For instance, as this article published in The New York Times in February 2012 discusses, gap teeth apparently went through a phase of popularity in the western fashion industry in the early 2010s.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the Dutch fashion model Lara Stone, whom the February 2012 article in The New York Times cites for her noticeable gap teeth, which were apparently in fashion with the industry at the time
Some methods of cleaning one’s teeth in the premodern world
People in the premodern world did not have modern toothbrushes, toothpaste, or dental floss, but most people did try to keep their teeth clean. The oldest tool for cleaning teeth is most likely the toothpick, which predates not only human civilization, but the human species itself. The oldest surviving undisputed hominin fossils outside of Africa come from the site of Dmanisi in what is now the country of Georgia in the Caucasus region. These fossils are estimated to date to sometime around 1.77 million years ago or thereabouts.
A study titled “Tooth wear and dentoalveolar remodeling are key factors of morphological variation in the Dmanisi mandibles,” published in October 2013 in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) 110(43): 17278–17283, concludes that the hominin fossils from Dmanisi display local periodontitis characteristic of habitual toothpick use, indicating that these early hominins may have used toothpicks to clean their teeth.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing Dmanisi skull five (cranium D4500 and mandible D2600)
Given that evidence for hominins using toothpicks appears so early in the anthropological record, it is hardly any surprise that toothpicks are basically universal throughout all cultures of the premodern world.
Many ancient Greek people seem to have regularly used toothpicks to clean their teeth. The ancient Greek historian Diodoros Sikeliotes (lived c. 90 – c. 30 BCE) famously records in his Library of History 21.16.4 that the Greek tyrant Agathokles of Syracuse (lived 361 – 289 BCE) was in the habit of using a quill feather as a toothpick to clean his teeth and a man named Menon assassinated him by giving him a poisoned quill. Diodoros writes, as translated by C. H. Oldfather:
“Now it was the king’s habit after dinner always to clean his teeth with a quill. Having finished his wine, therefore, he asked Menon for the quill, and Menon gave him one that he had smeared with a putrefactive drug. The king, unaware of this, applied it rather vigorously and so brought it into contact with the gums all about his teeth. The first effect was a continuous pain, which grew daily more excruciating, and this was followed by an incurable gangrene everywhere near the teeth.”
Some ancient people also used another tool to clean their teeth that is most likely a later development on the toothpick: the tooth-cleaning twig. Essentially, a person takes a twig and chews one end of it until it is frayed. Then the person can use the frayed end of the stick to brush or scrape their teeth to remove dirt and plaque. A person may choose to fray both ends of the stick or just fray one end and use the other end as a toothpick.
Like the toothpick, the tooth-cleaning twig is attested throughout many or possibly even all premodern cultures all over the globe. In some cultures, it even acquired ritual significance. For instance, the Tang Dynasty Chinese Buddhist monk Yìjìng (lived 635 – 713 CE) gives a detailed description of what the proper rituals were pertaining to a monk’s tooth-cleaning twig in his work A Record of the Inner Law Sent Home from the South Seas 1.8.208c, as translated by Li Rongxi on page 32 of his translation (a PDF of which is available for free through this webpage):
“Every day in the morning, a monk must chew a piece of tooth wood to brush his teeth and scrape his tongue, and this must be done in the proper way. Only after one has washed one’s hands and mouth may one make salutations. Otherwise both the saluter and the saluted are at fault.”
“In Sanskrit, the tooth wood is known as the dantakāṣṭha—danta meaning tooth, and kāṣṭha, a piece of wood. It is twelve finger-widths in length. The shortest is not less than eight finger-widths long, resembling the little finger in size. Chew one end of the wood well for a long while and then brush the teeth with it.”
The tooth-cleaning twig can be seen in some ways as a premodern forerunner to the toothbrush that most people know and use today.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing two tooth-cleaning twigs with ends frayed from chewing
Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that the ancient Romans washed their teeth with urine, nor is there solid evidence that I am currently aware of that any other ancient people did this. As I discuss in this post I wrote in March 2021, this notion arises from a misinterpretation of sources written by Roman authors from the first century BCE onward, which attribute the practice of washing one’s teeth with urine to the Celtiberians, a people residing in what is now Spain whom the Romans regarded as foreign and barbarous.
Roman authors such as the poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (lived c. 84 – c. 54 BCE) mock the Celtiberians for this supposed practice, but it is unclear how much truth lies behind these reports, since there are no surviving Celtiberian sources to confirm whether they really washed their teeth with urine and it is entirely possible that some Romans may have made up this story in order to portray the Celtiberians as gross and uncivilized.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an imaginative modern bust of the Roman poet Catullus, showing what the artist imagined he might have looked like. (No one knows what he actually looked like.)
Dental hygiene in first-century CE Roman Italy
Some of the largest and most thorough studies of dental hygiene and health in the premodern world have been conducted using the skeletal remains of inhabitants of the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, located the region around the Bay of Naples in Roman Italy, who died when Mount Vesuvius erupted in the year 79 CE.
We should not assume that the evidence from Pompeii and Herculaneum necessarily reflects the dental hygiene conditions in every part of the world throughout all of premodern history. Nonetheless, this evidence can give us an informative case study of what the dental hygiene status was like in one specific area of Roman Italy in the first century CE.
The archaeologists Sara C. Bisel and Jane F. Bisel provide a detailed survey of health and nutrition in Herculaneum based on their analysis of the skeletal remains of 139 individual people discovered at that site in their chapter “Health and Nutrition in Herculaneum: An Examination of Human Skeletal Remains,” originally printed in the edited volume The Natural History of Pompeii, edited by Wilhelmina Feemster Jashemski and Frederick G. Meyer, published by Oxford University Press in 2002, pages 451–475.
Bisel and Bisel conclude, as expected, that, in general, the people of Herculaneum in the first century CE had poorer dental hygiene than is considered normal in the twenty-first-century developed west. Nonetheless, they report that most people in this region of Roman Italy during this period seem to have eaten a nutritious diet with very little sugar, similar to the Mediterranean diet that is known today, and that they ate a lot of seafood, which is high in fluoride, which may have helped to protect people’s teeth.
ABOVE: Photograph from Sara C. and Jane F. Bisel’s chapter “Health and Nutrition at Herculaneum,” page 463, showing the teeth of Erc65 with periodontal disease
In the sample Bisel and Bisel examined, dental cavities and abscesses were abundant, but not universal. The average number of abscesses per mouth was 0.73 for those skeletons they identified as male and 0.66 for those skeletons they identified as female. They found that 37.4% of the people whose remains they examined had lost at least one tooth before their time of death. They also found that many of the inhabitants’ teeth display heavy attrition (i.e., wearing down) as the result of chewing stone-ground bread contaminated with lots of grit from the milling process.
Somewhat annoyingly, Bisel and Bisel obstinately insist on gendering all the people whose skeletons they discuss in their chapter, even in cases where they themselves admit that the person’s sex is unclear. As I discuss in this post I wrote back in March 2022, there is quite a bit of room for error and ambiguity when it comes to trying to determine a person’s sex based on their skeleton alone, especially when the skeleton is incomplete.
Furthermore, we should not assume that a person’s gender necessarily aligns with their assigned sex at birth, since, as I discuss in several posts, including this one I made in August 2020, there were people in the ancient world who might be described in modern terms as transgender. For these reasons, although I will state which sex Bisel and Bisel identify certain individuals as most likely belonging to, I will refer to all individuals mentioned here using gender-neutral pronouns.
I will also note that, although it is usually possible to tell the approximate age at time of death for a child or adolescent with a high degree of confidence based solely on their skeleton, it is generally impossible to determine the precise age of an adult through such a method. The best we can usually say for an adult is something along the lines of “This person was in their forties-ish.”
Bisel and Bisel somewhat annoyingly insist on assigning much more precise ages to many of their subjects than can possibly be reliably determined, probably because they know no one can definitively prove them wrong and they want to impress their readers by giving really specific numbers. For this reason, the ages I will give for the individuals mentioned are a little bit vaguer than what Bisel and Bisel give in their chapter.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about a few of the specific individuals that Bisel and Bisel discuss in their chapter. The Bisels observe that some of the most disadvantaged and marginalized residents of Herculaneum had extremely poor dental health and most likely suffered immense pain from the severe deterioration of their teeth and gums.
On page 468, they highlight the example of Erc27, a person whom they identify as most likely male and extremely poor or enslaved, who most likely died in around their mid-forties or so. This poor person had lost no less than seven teeth entirely before the time of their death and had no less than four cavities and four abscesses in their remaining teeth.
Bisel and Bisel observe that one abscess was so severe that the pus drained into the maxillary sinus. They also notice that the molars on the side of the person’s mouth with the severe abscess display excessive calculus formation, which suggests that this side of the mouth may have hurt so badly that the person may have chewed on the other side of their mouth, the side with no teeth.
By sharp contrast, Bisel and Bisel note that some evidently upper-class residents of Herculaneum in the first century CE actually had outstanding teeth, even by modern standards. On page 463, they highlight the example of Erc46, a person they identify as most likely female and upper-class, who most likely died in around their mid-thirties.
Erc46’s teeth are perfectly straight and well-aligned and in excellent condition, with only one small pit cavity in the first molar of their right mandible. Their teeth show very little wear, indicating that they most likely ate soft, refined bread made in bakeries, rather than the rough, stone-ground bread that poorer people ate.
ABOVE: Photograph from Sara C. and Jane F. Bisel’s chapter “Health and Nutrition at Herculaneum,” page 463, showing the skull of Erc46, a person they identify as female, most likely upper-class, who died at around age thirty-six or thereabouts, with outstanding teeth—perfectly aligned, with only one insignificant pit cavity and very little wear
Not all upper-class residents of Herculaneum had excellent teeth, however. Bisel and Bisel also highlight the example of Erc132, a child who died at around the age of eight who has been identified as having most likely belonged to an upper-class family on the basis of the fact that their bones were recovered wearing expensive jewelry (a gold finger ring with an inset gemstone and glass beads).
The child’s sex is uncertain, but Bisel and Bisel conclude that they are “more probably female than male” and refer to them as “she.” (As I note in my previous article I wrote back in March, it’s virtually impossible to reliably determine the sex of a prepubescent child based solely on their skeleton, since the skeletons of pre-pubescent children assigned female at birth are virtually identical to those assigned male at birth and vice versa.)
This child still had their primary teeth, which astonishingly had no less than five cavities in them! Bisel and Bisel note that Erc132 is the only individual they identified as upper-class who had so many cavities and wonder how on earth this very young child got so many. They remark: “Was she given a lot of honey-laden desserts? There’s no way of knowing.”
For more information about the analysis of teeth of Herculaneum residents, you can read the Bisels’ book chapter. The archaeologist Erica Rowan, who is now a lecturer in classical archaeology at Royal Holloway, University of London, also surveys several studies on the dental health of the people whose skeletal remains have been recovered from the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, including the Bisels’, in her 2014 doctoral thesis for the University of Oxford, titled “Roman Diet and Nutrition in the Vesuvian Region: A Study of the Bioarchaeological Remains from the Cardo V Sewer at Herculaneum,” on page 229.
Early Modern teeth
Concerning European history specifically, there was a time period when most western Europeans did have extremely nasty, rotten teeth. This was not, however, during antiquity or the Middle Ages, but rather the Early Modern Period, after western Europeans began to import and consume sugar, tobacco, and coffee—which are all extremely bad for one’s teeth—in enormous quantities, while still retaining the relatively poor state of oral hygiene that was prevalent in earlier periods.
To illustrate this phenomenon, in a documentary released by the History Hit network in 2018 titled “The Crude Practice of Medicine in Tudor England,” which you can watch on YouTube, Dr. Jelena Bekvalac, an osteologist for the Museum of London, shows the presenter two British skulls: one from the Early Middle Ages, which bears remarkably healthy teeth showing very few signs of decay, and another skull from the mid-sixteenth century, after the beginning of the mass importation and consumption of sugar and tobacco in Britain.
The sixteenth-century skull has lost basically all its molars, some teeth are so rotted away that only the roots remain, and the remaining teeth are heavily decayed and full of cavities. Although some people in antiquity and the Middle Ages had teeth this decayed, such as the extremely poor or enslaved individual from Herculaneum whom the Bisels discuss in their paper, this kind of decay became much more widespread and common among western Europeans from around the sixteenth century CE onward.
Unfortunately, modern people have a tendency to retroject things that they find appalling about the Early Modern Period back into antiquity and the Middle Ages. As a result, many people have incorrectly attributed the nearly universal state of tooth decay and disease that actually existed during the Early Modern Period to the earlier periods of antiquity and the Middle Ages.
ABOVE: Screenshots from the 2018 History Hit network documentary showing teeth from two British skulls: one from the Early Middle Ages with relatively healthy teeth (top) and one from the Tudor Period with absolutely disgusting, rotted teeth (bottom)
Could you make a post about Shinto? I’m a Shinto practitioner myself so I was wondering if you could.
Unfortunately, Shinto and Japanese history are far outside my main area of expertise, which is the ancient Mediterranean. I could try to write something about Shinto, but, over the past couple of years, I have grown more hesitant to write about topics that are far outside my area of specialty, because I have grown more conscious of just how limited my knowledge really is and I don’t want to inadvertently propagate misinformation. I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing a post about Shinto unless I had spent months beforehand thoroughly researching the topic.
Additionally, Shinto is an extremely broad topic with many thousands of different topics within it that I could write about. Is there a specific topic related to Shinto that you would like me to write about, such as a specific event, person, concept, or ritual?
Three cheers for Cornelia Swaimius van Leeuwenhoek!
Who is that?
The wife of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, in the 1670’s he experimented with magnifying lens and ‘discovered’ microscopic organisms. Supposedly he use scum scraped off her teeth for examination and eureka!.
From what I can tell, the public will often accept anything that makes ancient people look worse than them. I remember reading what you said about Steven Pinker’s claims. I think the same thing has happened with teeth.
Such an interesting article! To extrapolate further, readers might enjoy this TED talk on dental health as a sign of good or poor general health.https://www.ted.com/talks/marielle_pariseau_dmd_teeth_your_body_s_early_warning_system
Apropos tooth configuration, people of different nationalities often have differently configured palettes and sizes of teeth. The child of a mother with a small palette and small teeth and a father with a large palette and large teeth may have a small palette and large teeth and require extensive orthodonture so as not to have their teeth topple all over each other as they come in. This happened to a child I know with a Slovenian mother and Scottish father. My dentist said that this mismatch is something she has seen a number of times. It was probably much less common in ancient times when many people did not travel, or marry people outside their area.
This is an interesting if somewhat unexpected topic for you to cover! I have previously read about the Miswak, a type of tooth twig traditionally used in the Middle Ages and supposedly recommended by the Prophet Muhammed. I guess it might have been in use more in those regions were tea and coffee were popular earlier than in Europe?
I of course meant the Middle East in my comment, sorry for the mistake!
Consuming lots of sugar, tobacco, and coffee? Kind of like people today…
True, but the crucial difference is that early modern people were engaging in modern consumption habits while still retaining more-or-less medieval standards of oral hygiene. It’s the combination of both bad consumption habits and bad oral hygiene that led them to have such notoriously bad teeth.
In what form did they consume the sugar?
I’m pretty sure Bisel and Bisel are just basing the skeletons on biological sex and not gender identity. With these individuals being died, and no other evidence to indicate that they weren’t what we today call cis-gendered, sex is all we can (though on some degree as I’ll delve into) be certain off. Though you’re correct that basing one’s biological sex on skeletal remains yields limited information concerning such, especially if you’re only working with a few bones and/or if the individual wasn’t a adult. But like everything relating to the collecting of evidence in the fields of science, they’ll be a degree of uncertainty.
The Bisels use gendered pronouns to refer to the individuals whose skeletons they discuss, so they’re clearly speaking in terms of gender identity, rather than solely in terms of biological sex. If they were solely speaking in terms of biological sex, they would be using gender-neutral pronouns, as I do in my post above, since pronouns are a gendered cultural invention and have nothing to do with biology.
I am not strictly opposed to using gendered pronouns to refer to deceased people whose gender identities can be ascertained with a high degree of confidence. There are, however, a couple of reasons why I objected to the Bisels’ insistence on gendering the skeletons they discuss in this particular situation. The first reason is because all of these people died away from their homes (if they had them) during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and did not receive proper burials. Consequently, due to these unusual circumstances, we lack the archaeological context that would ordinarily help us to determine gender.
The second reason is because, in at least one of the cases I discuss here, the individual’s biological sex is uncertain. The Bisels themselves admit that Erc132 (the eight-year-old)’s sex is uncertain, due to the child being so young, but they still insist on calling the child “she” nonetheless, which I think is a little bit reckless.
Gendered pronouns are based on either gender identity or biological sex. So for example he/him is the preferred pronouns for a cis or transgender man, but it can also be used when describing human remains of someone of which surviving evidence indicates was biologically male until more evidence emerges to suggest otherwise.
The Buddha recommends the use of a tooth-brushing twig in a sutra — perhaps the only example of a religious founder giving dental hygiene advice.
What exactly would be the cause of the tooth decay seen in those very poor Romans? Wouldn’t they have even less access to simple sugars than the rich ones?
There are most likely a number of different factors at play. One factor is that poorer people were eating primarily stone-milled grain products. These products had lots of tiny bits and pieces of stone and grit in them from the milling process, which significantly wore down people’s teeth and destroyed the enamel. Wearing down the enamel, in turn, left the teeth much more vulnerable to decay. Wealthy people, by contrast, could afford to eat soft bakery-made breads that had less grit in them and didn’t wear down their teeth nearly as much.
Other factors to consider are that wealthy people also most likely had access to more resources that they could use to take care of their teeth (although the most basic resources—like toothpicks and tooth-cleaning twigs—would have been widely available even to the very poor), they had more leisure time to devote to keeping their teeth clean, and (assuming that they were socially active, as most wealthy people in ancient Greece and Rome were expected to be) they probably greater social incentive to keep their teeth clean and at least outwardly looking nice.
Wrong even Prophet Muhammad adviced to use the same
As usual, I quite liked this article! While I knew the gist of is, I didn’t know about the studies done in Pompeii, they were quite fascinating. It’s honestly kinda weird (in a… weirdly good way, I suppose?) how such a tragedy has then become a treasure trove for historians.
You might want to add the Chinese names (in Chinese characters) for the texts you quoted; I’m sure you didn’t find them in the texts you consulted, which is honestly a problem many such texts have, even modern ones. Still, it might be useful to someone looking for more info about the texts. In any case, Yijing is 義淨 and his text is called 南海寄歸內法傳 in Chinese. This might be useful information for someone who wanted to further research the topic.
Thank you so much for sharing this! Sadly, I don’t know a word of Chinese. You seem to have a lot of knowledge about many different languages. Out of curiosity, which languages do you know? Do you know Chinese?
At this point in my life, I can only say that I really know four languages. Obviously, I’m highly fluent in English, since it’s my native language and the language I’ve spoken for basically my whole life. In addition, I know German reasonably well from having taken four years of it in high school, but I’m far from fluent in it, especially since I’ve barely used it in four years and have forgotten some of what I once knew.
I can read Latin and Ancient Greek pretty well from having taken four years of Latin and three years of Ancient Greek in undergrad, but I still have to look up words fairly often and I don’t think that I could speak either language conversationally.
I was also able to track down the original passage in classical Chinese; that, you might want to quote, since you usually do the same with Ancient Greek/Latin passages. Here it is:
每日旦朝。須嚼齒木揩齒刮舌務令如法。盥漱清淨方行敬禮。若其不然。受禮禮他悉皆得罪。其齒木者。梵云憚哆家瑟詑。憚哆譯之為齒。家瑟詑即是其木。長十二指。短不減八指。大如小指。一頭緩須熟嚼。良久淨刷牙關。
> Out of curiosity, which languages do you know?
Answer being, far from enough to me 😛
So, it’s Italian (native language), English (to an *almost* native degree), I do have passive understanding of Lombardian (I can only say this in a non-Italian-speaking, otherwise I would get laughed at for including what in Italy is considered a ‘dialect’ at best and ‘slang/uncultured Italian at worst, but that’s another can of worms); I probably could translate from and maybe to German with a dictionary, but have almost no competence without such a resource, and slightly better for Chinese (which I did study ad university but badly). I can decently communicate in and read Japanese.
When it comes to what really matters to me, historical languages, I have working knowledge of Latin (taught in most high school in Italy), and could probably read most easy-to-medium texts with a dictionary – Italian being quite similar helps. I also am decently good at Biblical Hebrew, and even more so at classical Japanese – depending on the genre, since the writing style can wildly change. I don’t know classical Chinese except from the basics, but I can wade through a simple text with a dictionary, I reckon. The two historical languages I know the most are Old English and Old Norse, which I also know at an active level. That is, I could technically speak it and write things in it. Which I have actually done, and still do – one of my current pet projects is translating the script of the game ‘Undertale’ into Old Norse, since it’s a game I greatly enjoyed.
Oh gosh! That’s really impressive.
I’m honestly more of a history nerd than a language nerd. I’ve studied the languages that I have mainly in order to be able to read historical sources for research purposes, rather than for the sake of the languages themselves.
Sadly, I know almost no Biblical Hebrew. All I know is the alphabet and a small handful of vocabulary words. If I were to learn another ancient language, I think that Biblical Hebrew would be the first one I would choose to learn, most likely followed by Sumerian and Akkadian and maybe followed after that by Hittite and Egyptian.
I’m probably going to have to learn French at some point, but I am not able to read or understand the language currently.
I think you both are very skilled with languages!
I have studied German for more years than you, Spencer, but I would have difficulties translating the kinds of paragraphs I have seen you do in the past in that language. In secondary/high school I had one year of Latin (which I keep up a little bit by sometimes looking up the original when reading translated Roman works to compare), but I was rather embarrassed to notice that it was difficult for me to translate the basic sentences in one of your old posts (https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/08/17/google-translate-cannot-handle-dead-languages/) without using a dictionary.
And Wichiteglega, your linguistic skills are amazing and admirable! From Latin I found I like the methods for learning historical languages more than to learn living. I would really like to know what resources you use! I studied Japanese for three years, so Classical Japanese would be very interesting, and I imagine Old Norse and Old English might be a little easier for someone with knowledge of several Germanic languages like me
Can you also speak corsivoe?
Really interesting post, Spencer.
As you said, it’s really common (and annoying to history buffs) that Early Modern period bad things get projected backwards to earlier periods. Francis Bacon’s ghastly advices on hygiene could be easily disguised as medieval practices and no one would notice.
Indeed! And thank you for the complement on the post, by the way!
This is completely off topic, but could you refute some of the claims made by the online pseudoscholar Lloyd DeMause?
He’s not particularly well known, but he has been an inspiration to such odious characters as Stefan Molyneux, in his vilification of Indigenous Australians.
he says a lot of extremely dubious stuff, and even I have been able to find many of his citations are complete garbage, but you could explode the things he says about ancient Greek, Roman and Mediterranean societies much more thoroughly than I can.
I think you’ve asked me to write about this guy before. I still haven’t had the chance to read any of his work, but I can look into it and, if his work annoys me enough, I may write a post debunking it.
I have asked before, thanks, McDaniel.
These I the reasons why he’s such a bete noir of mine:
1. His work is available for free online
2. It seems extremely academic and credible at a glance, since it has footnotes and sources and such.
3. DeMause presents himself as a heroic champion of truth, which has been shamelessly suppressed by generations of idiotic and dishonest academics
4. He purports to explain the whole shape and motion of history, and to have the all the solutions and answers. Uniquely, he is able to do this without sounding like a megalomaniac.
5. His work is incredibly appealing to people who distrust academia, and since it revolves around child abuse as the supposed driving force behind history, it could serve as a gateway drug for QAnonnery, especially because DeMause himself is outwardly a “Liberal” in the American sense, and all his overtly proposed policies are liberal ones. So he comes off as someone who can’t possibly be biased in favor of QAnnon.
6. Bizarrely enough, his writings also allow urban, left-leaning people to write off anyone with different political views as a fundamentally deranged and irreparably psychologically damaged individual, who must be stripped of political and parenting rights if civilization is to survive. He never says that out loud, but it’s the logical conclusion of his ideology.
In short, his work is very easily available, just atrociously untrue and misleading, while being extremely seductive/convincing and possessing the unique ability to bring out the absolute worst in everyone who reads it.
Practically every ad I’ve gotten on this post is related to dental hygiene, dentistry, or the like.
Ha! No surprises there, I guess!
I apologize if this has been covered, but is your thesis available to read and where could I get it?
Thank you for your articles. I am a middle and high school history and classics teacher and I often assign your articles. They seem to resonate well and I use them both for the content and to show how good scholarship approaches sources and claims (I also show that bar scene from Good Will Hunting).
Welcome to the Boston area
You’re welcome and thank you so much for the positive feedback! I am so glad that you enjoy my blog and find my articles educational. You are not the only teacher who has told me that they assign my articles to their students. It’s a little weird to think about how, when I first began writing this blog back in November 2016, I was a junior in high school myself. Now I’m about to enter graduate school and there are teachers assigning my articles to their students.
Unfortunately, my undergraduate honors thesis is not available anywhere to read online as far as I am aware, unless my university has posted it somewhere.