The WrestlingSmarks History Club

[Barry Poppins]

Bought this at Barnes & Nobles today, I'm always about those ancient civilizations.

 

[Hoss]

 

[Chris]

The cat domestication is interesting bc it really seems like it was so much more transactional, where with wolves/dogs, the benefits weren't directly utilized, they just formed a bond over not eating each other or being to hostile.

But cats were just: they eat rats, so we don't eat the cats, they keep to themselves, we keep to ours.

 

[Barry Poppins]

The history of animal domestication is extremely interesting tbh and you can kind of look to them as bookmarks to human evolution as well.

 

[Chris]

The history of animal domestication is extremely interesting tbh and you can kind of look to them as bookmarks to human evolution as well.

I've heard it argued very convincingly that domesticating the horse was the most important domestication in our history.

 

[Barry Poppins]

I've heard it argued very convincingly that domesticating the horse was the most important domestication in our history.

Almost has to be because without it the wheel and the chariot, which is two of the most important innovations in human history, would have taken much longer to develop.

 

[Barry Poppins]

So this is a random question I thought I'd hand out to everyone here.

What is everyone's "favorite" or in their opinion the most interesting unsolved death of a historical figure.

For example there's William II of England, who died from an arrow during a hunting trip, though nobody knows who killed him or if it was premeditated. There's also Montezuma II of the Aztec Empire, in which conflicting historical accounts cannot say for certain what caused his death. Finally there's also Caesarion, the illegitimate son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra VIII, who was killed on the orders of Augustus, yet nobody knows how he died.

We can even include historical characters who just go missing from the records, or disappear entirely, like the Princes in the Tower.

 

[Loochblade]

We can even include historical characters who just go missing from the records, or disappear entirely, like the Princes in the Tower.

I mean that one will never be solved, for obvious reasons... but I'm inclined to believe that the bones they found about 150 years later or so are the remains of the two, until anything else substantial would be found and that Richard had his hands in the whole story. It just fits too perfectly with him getting the throne that way.

Of course, it's been some time since I read about the story, so I might remember something wrong there.

 

[Chris]

The story of Bardiya in Achaemenid Persian history is fascinating.

The "canon" for the longest time is that someone claiming to be the son of Cyrus and brother of Cambysses (first kings of the empire) was toppled by the next king, Darius. This "fake" Bardiya has a whole backstory where he's actually a guy named Gaumata, which was so crucially written on the side of a mountain in multiple languages by Darius himself.

The problem here is....Darius clearly made this up to kill the real Bardiya without having to worry about people being upset about him staying a coup. But it was accepted as fact for so long that most historians are still being stubborn about it.

So to relate it back to your question, let's pretend they're right and Darius was telling the truth....then wtf happened to actual Bardiya and why wasn't anyone concerned about this when a fake was revealed lol

 

[Chris]

Also just related to that same empire, I can't recall if it's Cyrus or Darius or possibly even both, but we don't know how they died either. Herodotus notes that he heard a lot of theories and then doesn't write about any of them except for a scandalous one that popped him, but over time other sources have come to us with lots of discrepancies.

 

[Chris]

The story of Bardiya in Achaemenid Persian history is fascinating.

The "canon" for the longest time is that someone claiming to be the son of Cyrus and brother of Cambysses (first kings of the empire) was toppled by the next king, Darius. This "fake" Bardiya has a whole backstory where he's actually a guy named Gaumata, which was so crucially written on the side of a mountain in multiple languages by Darius himself.

The problem here is....Darius clearly made this up to kill the real Bardiya without having to worry about people being upset about him staying a coup. But it was accepted as fact for so long that most historians are still being stubborn about it.

So to relate it back to your question, let's pretend they're right and Darius was telling the truth....then wtf happened to actual Bardiya and why wasn't anyone concerned about this when a fake was revealed lol

Okay maybe I'm a tad too harsh on modern historians bc this is from wiki

Most modern historians do not consider Darius' version of events convincing, and assume that the person who ruled for a few months was the real son of Cyrus, and that the story of his impersonation by a magus was an invention of Darius to justify his seizure of the throne.
The key argument against a fabrication is that there is no evidence for it, and lacking further discoveries that view "must remain hypothetical". However, the idea that Gaumata was a fabrication is nonetheless appealing because "it was vital for a man like Darius, who had no particular rights to the throne, to invent a character (Gaumata) condemned for his acts against gods and men." There are some implausibilities in the official story, e.g. the impostor resembled the real Bardiya so closely that most of his wives did not spot the difference, except for queen Phaidyme. Darius often accused rebels and opponents of being impostors (such as Nebuchadnezzar III) and it could be straining credibility to say that they all were.