Inscriptions: the maker’s mark, including the crossed flails of Diefstetter and the shield of Bavaria
The sword has a blackened hilt made up of a cone-shaped pommel of octagonal section. The shouldered grip is made of wood and bound with fish-skin. The long straight, spatulated guard is engraved with feathering at the ends on the left side, while the knuckle-guard, side-ring, pas d’âne, and counter-guards are all riband-like and of triangular section. The single-edge blade (except towards the point) is doubly grooved and stamped with the maker’s work.
This sword probably comes from Schloss Ambras in Tyrol where a considerable number of comparable swords survive. Other examples bearing like marks are to be found in the Armeria Reale, Turin (G 16), at the Hermitage, St. Petersburg (B 402), and at Vienna (Boeheim, Album I, Taf. XI 2). In addition to this swords marked with the crossed flails of Diefstetter and the shield of Bavaria are a hand-and-a half sword in the Pauilhac Collection; one sold at Sotheby’s, 15 August, 1941, lot 19; and another in the Lockett Collection, sold Christie’s, 1942, lot 307.
Sidenotes:
The swordsmith Melchior Diefstetter worked at Au near Munich.
He was the son of Caspar I and is recorded as not being of full age in 1497.
About 1523 he was recorded with two sons, Georg and Ulrich. He died in or before 1556 and was survived by a widow, Barbara, and eight children still minors.
One of his other sons, Caspar II, was a swordsmith in Munich by 1537 and died in 1552. His son Ulrich was Bavarian court swordsmith “in der Au”, and is recorded by frequent payments in the Ducal accounts between 1555 and 1589.
A sword blade inscribed ARIAS PANTMER IN VRI / VLRICH DIEFSTETER IN MANAGI, with the arms of Bavaria and the monk’s head of Munich stamped on it, is in the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Zurich (Inv. No. LM27328; Schneider, 1980, No. 183).
A fourth generation of the family is represented by Arsatius Diefstetter, active 1588-1616, and a fifth by his sons Hans, who died in 1613, and Albrecht, active 1616 to 1630, latterly in Passau. (H. Stocklein, Z.H. W.K., VIII, 1918-20, pp. 371 and 375-82).
If the blades of this group of swords are contemporary with the hilts, they are probably by Ulrich Diefstetter rather than by Melchior, to whom they are usually attributed as Ulrich Diefstetter also used the mark of crossed flails, often in conjunction with the head of a bull transfixed with an arrow.
“A young African negro has been in this city for the last few days who claims to be a Hebrew. He is deaf and dumb and as black as the ace of spades. He carries a pad of paper with him and answers all questions by writing them in Hebrew and Loschen Khodish. What excites the most wonder is that he writes Loschen Khodish very rapidly. It is the language of the books of Moses, and is made a special study of, spoken and written with ease only by the rabbis and highly educated Hebrews.
“The negro was sent to one of the rabbis of Hartford, who is perfectly satisfied that he is a Hebrew. He says that he came from a large town in Africa, where there is a tribe of about 20,000 black Hebrews who speak Loschen Khodish and are quite prosperous. He also says that his father is a rabbi in that town, and that is why his father took the trouble to teach him to write these languages, which needed an extra amount of labor on account of his being deaf and dumb.
“He says his people not only write Loschen Khodish, but it is their speaking language as well. He left home a few years ago and has seen a good deal of the world. In each town he hunts up the Jewish section, and there they give him clothes, food and money.
"What surprises him, he writes, is that no Hebrew knows of his countrymen in Africa.”
I’d love to read a book about his experiences traveling the world. Would be nice if they at least mentioned his name and where in Africa he hails from.
I had reason recently to reference this post again, and I’ll reiterate that it’s definitely in my top five all time favorites (that I didn’t even post myself :P).
I took a class about Ancient Egypt last semester and we had a whole lecture dedicated to talking about how gay Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were. Their tomb walls were decorated with scenes of them ignoring their wives in favor of embracing each other. In one scene, the couple is seated at a banquet table that is usually reserved for a husband and wife. There’s an entire motif of Khnumhotep holding lotus flowers which in ancient Egyptian tradition symbolizes femininity. Khnumhotep offers the lotus flower to Niankhkhnum, something that only wives were ever depicted as doing for their husbands. In fact, Khnumhotep is repeatedly depicted as uniquely feminine, being shown smaller and shorter than his partner Niankhkhnum and being placed in the role of a woman. Size is a big deal in Egyptian art, husbands are almost always shown as being larger and taller than their wives. So for two men of equal status to be shown in once again, a marital fashion, is pretty telling. Not to mention they were literally buried together which is the strongest bond two people could share in ancient Egypt, as it would mean sharing the journey to the afterlife together. And yet 90% of the academic text about these two talks about these clues in vague terms and analyze the great “brotherhood” they shared, and the enigma of Khnumhotep being depicted as feminine. Apparently it’s too hard for archaeologists to accept homosexuality in the ancient world, as well as the possibility of trans individuals.
On the last note, I was walking around the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and there is a mummy on exhibit. It caught my attention because the panel that was describing it was talking about how it was a woman’s body in a male coffin and wow, the Egyptian working that day really screwed that up. My summary, not actual words, sorry I can’t remember verbatim but it basically said that someone screwed up.
They claimed that the Egyptians screwed up a burial.
The Egyptians. Screwed up. A burial.
Now I’m not an expert in Ancient Egypt but from what I know, and what the exhibit was telling me, burials and the afterlife and all that jazz DEFINED the Egyptian religion and culture. They don’t just ‘screw up’. So instead of thinking outside the box for two seconds and wonder why else a genetically female body was in a male coffin, the ‘researchers’ blatantly disregard the rest of their research and decided to call it a screw up. Instead of, you know, admitting that maybe this mummy presented as male during his life and was therefore honorably buried as he was identified. But it would be too much of a stretch to admit that a transgender person could have existed back then.
(Sorry I can’t find any sources online and it’s been like 2 years but it stuck in my mind)
There’s a lot of bigoted historian dragging on my dash these days and it makes me happy.
Once again, more proof that we queers have ALWAYS been here, and it’s a CHOSEN narrative to erase them.
I am reblogging this for the lols as well as a very accessible and engaging reminder that every historical narrative is created by human beings interpreting existing evidence and will necessarily reflect their biases, experiences, cultural norms and taboos.
Human objectivity is a myth, and until we have diversity present and speaking out in and across all disciplines, the truth will remain obscured.
So my financial situation has just moved from “awkward laughing into the abyss” to “the abyss laughs back.” In short, I am:
The long and short of it is that we moved cross-country so my wife
could work at a job that would catapult us out of poverty–only to find
out that when they SAID “You’ll start work in September,” they MEANT “Or
June the year after, probably. We don’t know anymore.”
So
things are…. not good. We are of course both looking for new jobs
here, but in the meantime, there’s that whole -gestures vaguely- food
thing, and -gestures vaguely-er- rent thing, and -gestures at sick cat,
who is sneezing adorably- vet bills thing.
I’m not expecting
commissions to cover all that–even just a few bucks for groceries would
be enough to get the financial abyss to stop cackling with glee. But
here’s the run-down of emergency commission prices!
$10 – a bust, in color! Like this!
Ain’t that a deal? Yeah. I mean. I’m sure it is. Or, there’s:
$20 – Full body, full color picture. Look at that!
$25 – A 7in. by 6in. comic! Like this, but
fancy!
Ain’t that fancy? You bet it is.
If
you are interested in a commission, send me an email at
batfee@gmail.com. I humbly ask that commissions stay PG-13 or lower,
though!
Reblog for the weekend crowd!
Do you love the awesome comics done for our episodes? Now, you can commission your very own! We highly vouch for the quality and fun of working with @oh-fee-oh-my
She just did one about Richard & Alec at the theater in Swordspoint for someone on commission!
So as sometimes happens when something negative goes viral, bookish Twitter took action on Monday and responded to an anti-diversity rant that had gone up the night before with a powerful message—that we as a community support diverse narratives.
It began with an author asking people to raise their voices and support diversity and the marginalized in the process. The author later asked to become anonymous and people not connect them to the hashtag anymore, because the backlash against the positive hashtag that came out of it unfortunately brought loads of racists and hateful people into their mentions—another problem all on its own. The hashtag began as #IStandForDiversity, but later transitioned to #ISupportDiversity because the first hashtag was unintentional ableist, but important tweets were shared at both, so I’m going to share some here.
As Paul and Heidi said, one of the best ways to really support diverse books and marginalized authors is to buy books and request them at the library. So, of course, here are a couple book recommendation threads.
So there you have it. Support with your voices, and more importantly with your bought and requested books. Because representation is so, so important and we’re just getting started.
For the film, the linguistic consultants included Jessica Coon, Lisa deMena Travis, and Morgan Sonderegger, all from McGill. The set designers spent time with Travis and Coon in their offices and ended up borrowing many of their books, as well as reproducing other items from their offices, in order to create the office set.
Via e-mail, Coon writes:
The set crew came to my office first and took a lot of pictures (they liked my tea kettle and plants, and they wanted to know what kind of bag I carry). They needed to rent a certain number of feet of books, but I didn’t have enough, so we went up to Lisa’s office. I keep a fairly tidy office… they liked Lisa’s much better. […]
But Travis told me that the set designers were less interested in titles than colors: they were particularly interested in borrowing blue and beige books. Fortunately, she had plenty of both. Many of the blue ones are in the Linguistik Aktuell series from John Benjamins (Travis serves on the advisory editorial board). And she had lots of beige-colored journals (e.g., Language, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory,Linguistic Inquiry, Oceanic Linguistics) and conference proceedings (e.g., NELS, short for the North East Linguistic Society).
Sequences that take place in the code-breaking tent where military cryptographers struggle to crack the aliens’ language, feature words that Coon wrote on whiteboards to lend that process a more authentic air. Words like “articulators.”
The articulators that humans use to form speech include our tongue, teeth and lips. “[The aliens] don’t look human at all, their vocal tracts and their mouths or whatever they’re using to make language is nothing like ours,” says Coon. In a situation like that, the military experts would probably be thinking a lot about articulators.
We’re right to push for diversity, we have to, but it is only step one of a long journey. Lack of racial diversity is a symptom. The underlying illness is institutional racism. It walks hand in hand with sexism, cissexism, homophobia, and classism. To go beyond this same conversation we keep having, again and again, beyond tokens and quick fixes, requires us to look the illness in the face and destroy it. This is work for white people and people of color to do, sometimes together, sometimes apart. It’s work for writers, agents, editors, artists, fans, executives, interns, directors, and publicists. It’s work for reviewers, educators, administrators. It means taking courageous, real-world steps, not just changing mission statements or submissions guidelines.
Maybe the word hasn’t been invented yet – that thing beyond diversity. We often define movements by what they’re against, but the final goal is greater than the powers it dismantles, deeper than any statistic. It’s something like equity – a commitment to harvesting a narrative language so broad it has no face, no name.
We can love a thing and still critique it. In fact, that’s the only way to really love a thing. Let’s be critical lovers and loving critics and open ourselves to the truth about where we are and where we’ve been. Instead of holding tight to the same old, failed patriarchies, let’s walk a new road, speak new languages. Today, let’s imagine a literature, a literary world, that carries this struggle for equity in its very essence, so that tomorrow it can cease to be necessary, and disappear.
How can we tell apart different sonorant consonants- your [n]s and [m]s, [l]s and [ɹ]s? What do their sound waves look like? In this week’s episode, we take a look at the acoustics of nasal and approximant consonants: how opening up your nose influences your speech, how similar some consonants are to being vowels, and why it can be hard for some people to tell apart the English l and r.
I tried dressing up differently for this episode, too, which was pretty fun. Looking forward to hearing what people have to say! ^_^
New Ling Space! Whoops I’ve been sporadic in my reblogs lately. Hope I can catch up sometime ^^;
A.E. Prevost 