Most scribes were fairly well off since their abilities were in demand — it’s been estimated that only 1% of ancient Egyptians were literate — but some were far more powerful and wealthy than others, and their duties and level of literacy varied. There is quite a difference between a personal scribe of the vizier, an army scribe, and a local village scribe! Keep in mind that the people we lump together as scribes held a wide variety of positions that partially determined their status and responsibilities — priest, butler/cupbearer, physician/exorcist, construction foreman, treasury official, etc.

For more info, see Ancient Egyptian Scribes: A Cultural Exploration by Niv Allon and Hana Navratilova and the chapter “Scribes” by Alessandro Roccati in The Egyptians edited by Sergio Donadoni.

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It wasn't easier to track via the moon, it was MUCH easier. How exactly do you calculate the solar cycle in ancient times? You won't have accurate-enough timekeeping for centuries to know the exact day of the solstice by tracking duration of day, you're basically stuck trying to accurately measure shadows or the angle of the sun, which takes years of observations to establish. That's a lot of effort for anyone and is very not-portable. It's something only the elites can do or will care about.

But anybody can see the moon, and it's not even 10 fingers' worth of counting from full or new to a quarter moon. It's very easy for everyone to observe and to track with. It's also not ambiguous--a full moon is a full moon, you might be off by a day at most, and there would be general agreement in a community.

And the primary thing you need timekeeping for is agriculture (because that's what 90% plus of the population do, and what 100% eat). But, due to weather variability, knowing when spring astronomically begins doesn't help you all that much. Temperature trends, rain, likelihood of a frost, all of those are more important. IIRC, lunar calendars (the Islamic calendar being a notable exception) usually start counting in the spring, when X crop needs to be harvested and Y crop planted for just this reason.

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ok first i read it as Indonesians and Australians living in the Italian library

I made a post about this in Archaeology but it was removed so asking here. Apologies about the size.

Why did ancient people use the lunar cycle in addition to the solar cycle?

Tracking the 365 days between a solstice seems like an accurate solution to knowing when seasons will begin/end. If we were to say Spring begins on the 90th day (just an example) this would be accurate for several years.

Why did people supplement this with the use of lunar cycles when they do not line up with the seasons very well (approx 1/3 of a month further out of sync every year)?

The only reason I can think of is that tracking lunar cycles is extremely straightforward and anyone can do it, but it creates the issue of needing to realign every few years (often an extra month after the winter solstice if I remember right). The lunar cycle has been used in essentially every ancient culture so there obviously must be other benefits than it just being 'easy'. What are these?

Yes, I think I only encountered it in the 2000s, and even now it's not that common outside academia. Hopefully the fad will pass.

That's the thing - I only knew of 1 Eurasia, the Eurasia that I was taught in elementary school, so why would I think it was anything different?

How important was the Scribe profession in the ancient world, notably in say Egypt? Were they automatically part of the court or just a simple Bureaucrat? Did it determine who one married etc.?

The discovery of a trove of long-forgotten, black-and-white photographs in an Italian library has proven that a group of Indigenous Australians formed a community in South East Asia 150 years ago.

That sucks. I had a course (unrelated) being changed halfway through with all of my intended options being scrapped, so i feel the pain of not getting the course you wanted. It's always best to get the details before accepting, but my experience is that you can't even rely on that.

One other thing to remember is that the Armistice (with Germany) was November 11, 1918, but the various treaties didn't get signed until mid-1919. There was sporadic fighting but more importantly, the soldiers are still deployed, still training, standing guard, etc. Your great uncle probably did die from influenza, but it might have been a training accident or pneumonia or something else caused by still being deployed.

Most of "Eastern Europe" was formally independent of the Soviet Union. But, the Soviet hegemony absolutely did include Poland, East Germany, etc., (and considering Russian/Soviet ambitions have never particularly been satisfied with their current borders), making them de facto part of the Soviet Union.

I wasn't thinking just of colonies, rather of a range of economic and political outpourings - its contributions to industrialisation, liberalism, modern parliamentary governance (even if few had a say). Nobody but the king lamented the loss of the 13 colonies that much - within a few years trade was bouncing along as never before - rather it's the passing of the later "second" empire that that still agitates some fevered minds.

The conflict of the 1640s was again primarily about political power, and the economic dimension mostly involved division among the well-to-do between those benefiting from privileges granted by the crown and those competing in the market. Food was (as across most of Europe) more expensive than a century earlier owing to the inflow of Spanish colonial silver, but prices on the eve of the civil war weren't much above those of the previous 20-30 years.

The peerage continued mostly unmolested under the Commonwealth, though the House of Lords was abolished from 1649 until the Restoration of 1660 ended a brief experiment with a hand-picked upper house. Cromwell was invited to assume the crown, but declined: his title of Lord Protector can be interpreted as regent, though he insisted his regime was republican. He wasn't averse to the odd palace: most of the less essential royal properties were sold off in 1649, but today's older residences remained state assets, Cromwell governing from Whitehall Palace (its site today occupied mostly by the MoD and Cabinet Office after most of the old building burned down in 1698, the Banqueting House and parts of the basement surviving).

John Green's Crash Course History series

Thanks for the reply. I agree that Britain found a good outlet for its restlessness in the form of colonies. The British may have lamented the loss of the 13 colonies, but the reality is that if those rebel colonists had still been in England, Britain might have followed the same path as France.

Still, nothing motivates people like hunger. Without bread, the circus only goes so far, and England did have a civil war back in the 17th century. Speaking of which, I have a question about that too. During the years when Cromwell was in charge, did British nobles continue to have the same powers and privileges? Was there anything in the way of a ceremonial monarch? Who was living in the royal palaces?

another possibility is that there was something similar like a small island village or settlement that was submerged later, and plato used that as the base to craft out the atlantis story, which is the allegory as u said here

You're not wrong. I deleted my comment.

My frustration stems from the fact that I applied to a "Russian & Eurasian Studies" program, thinking that it was simply focusing on Russia's place within the broader Eurasia, only to get here and find out it's just a post-Soviet studies program.

Of course, I now know this is par for the course throughout Western universities, think tanks, etc. But as a first-gen college student from a poor area of the U.S., I had no way of knowing this beforehand. I was going off of what I was taught, and it makes me feel misled.

Furthermore, I think there's a strong argument that what I thought this program would be makes more sense in the 21st century than straight up area studies.

That's indeed a possibility I hadn't allowed for: the date and place make me think influenza, but a prior gas encounter could be the cause. It could even be both, with the flu rendering an older condition fatal.

It was the airbases that really spooked us. Planes didn’t have great range so having a daisy chain of airbases from Japan to the aleutians could potentially grow to be a bigger threat than one would think 🤣.

It's not lost, it was an allegory. Plato didn't hold knowledge of a lost civilisation that no one else did, but he did create stories to make people think and to prove his point. It would be like if I told you that there was a great land of Reddites where the civilians all paid for products with not money but their words, and the best words gained the best money, so people began to copy each others words word-for-word to try and make the same amount of money they all got, but this just created a world where no one knew how to make an original argument anymore and it descended into madness and fell into itself. In fact, I stole that example from someone else.

But it's a good description. People in antiquity were made fun of for thinking it was a real place. It was only in the last couple hundred or so years that people really started to miss the context of the story and begin to think it was real. Just like if my post about the land of Reddites was found 1000 years later away from all the other context I provided people might think that I was describing a real place. But most people who argue that Atlantis is real can't read Ancient Greek, aren't familiar with Plato, and haven't actually studied the topic well. There's a reason for that.

Thoughts on lost city of Atlantis ???

Ah ok, thanks

It wasn't that belts were too expensive. As demonstrated in this historical video of Prince Albert's wardrobe, wealthy upper class men also wore suspenders at the time.

The issue was that trousers in the 18th and 19th centuries were high-waisted and belts wouldn't have helped keep them up, especially because trousers weren't made with belt loops.

Trousers became lower waisted and began to made with belt loops in the 1920s.

OK so in a lot of old movies all the farm/ country people wear trousers with suspenders. Belts were a thing from BC so, is it like that they were too expensive for the average farmer to acquire in contrast to suspenders?