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Four newly translated Japanese texts describe how ritual samurai beheadings were supposed to take place during the Edo period and later.When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. This 1860 photo shows a samurai with a raised sword. Four newly translated texts shed light on how samurai carried out the death ritual of Seppuku. (Image credit: Heritage Images / Contributor via Getty Images) Four texts that discuss how the samurai carried out Seppuku, a ritual death in which a fellow samurai would usually behead another, have been translated into English...

Modern society's focus on credentials has created a two-tiered system, where multi-talented individuals are criticized, and elites oversee a dependent underclass. The songwriter, actor, country/western singer, musician, U.S. Army veteran, helicopter pilot, accomplished rugby player and boxer, Rhodes scholar, Pomona College and University of Oxford degreed, and summa cum laude literature graduate, Kris Kristofferson, recently died at 88. Americans may have known him best for writing smash hits like “Me and Bobby McGee” and “For the Good Times,” his wide-ranging, star-acting roles in A Star is Born and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, his numerous solo albums, especially with...

A lot of history’s famous quotes are either misattributed or were never spoken in the first place. In addition to the fact that Gandhi never said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” and no one aboard Apollo 13 ever uttered the phrase, “Houston, we have a problem,” Julius Caesar didn’t say, “Et tu, Brute?” (“You too, Brutus?”) as he was stabbed to death by a group of Roman senators that included his supposed bestie. The line comes from Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar and is followed by its protagonist’s last words, “Then fall, Caesar”...

Waldemar Januszczak challenges the traditional notion of the Renaissance having fixed origins in Italy and showcases the ingenuity in both technique and ideas behind great artists such as Van Eyck, Memling, Van der Weyden, Cranach, Riemenschneider and Durer.The Great Myths Of The Renaissance (Waldemar Januszczak Documentary) | 59:51Perspective | 429K subscribers | 1,152,290 views | September 12, 2020

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Siege_of_Malta The number of casualties is in as much dispute as the number of invaders. Balbi gives 35,000 Turkish deaths,[4] Bosio 30,000 casualties (including sailors).[5] Several other sources give about 25,000.[43] The knights lost a third of their number, and Malta lost a third of its inhabitants. Birgu and Senglea were essentially leveled. Still, 6,000 defenders had managed to withstand a siege of more than four months in the hot summer, despite enduring a bombardment of some 130,000 cannonballs. Jean de Valette, Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, had a key influence in the victory against the Ottomans with...

The people of London who had managed to survive the Great Plague in 1665 must have thought that the year 1666 could only be better, and couldn’t possibly be worse! Poor souls… they could not have imagined the new disaster that was to befall them in 1666. A fire started on September 2nd in the King’s bakery in Pudding Lane near London Bridge. Fires were quite a common occurrence in those days and were soon quelled. Indeed, when the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth was woken up to be told about the fire, he replied “Pish! A woman...

[snip] Posted With Permission of Don Ross. Recorded at Trinity United Church in Cannington (Ontario, Canada) on Saturday, September 15, 2001. Tuning: DADFCE [/snip]Wall of Glass (Don Ross) | 6:54Bruce Head | 553 subscribers | 19,596 views | March 17, 2007

THAT VIKINGS crossed the Atlantic long before Christopher Columbus is well established. Their sagas told of expeditions to the coast of today’s Canada: to Helluland, which scholars have identified as Baffin Island or Labrador; Markland (Labrador or Newfoundland) and Vinland (Newfoundland or a territory farther south). In 1960 the remains of Norse buildings were found on Newfoundland.But there was no evidence to prove that anyone outside northern Europe had heard of America until Columbus’s voyage in 1492. Until now. A paper for the academic journal Terrae Incognitae by Paolo Chiesa, a professor of Medieval Latin Literature at Milan University, reveals...

Salvator Mundi, a $450 million painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, has not been seen publicly since it sold at Christie’s in 2017, the year it became the most expensive artwork ever auction. And the reason for that, according to a new BBC report, is that it may be held in storage in Geneva. The good news, per the BBC, is that its owner, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, may eventually make it publicly viewable. According to that report, the crown prince, often labeled MBS for short, plans to display it in a future museum in...

This is the first time I have ever shared this in whole, I have however shared portions before. I offer this thesis as it was presented to my Church History professor in 2008, minus the bibliography or credits. This is somewhat long, but I have been told by others it flows well, so it doesn't seem as long. I'll let you decide if that is true. Mind you, I was not as polished at writing back then, so if you see any egregious errors in my punctuation or grammar you will know why. I pray everyone enjoys it, and please...

We've recently been told by Ivy League Idiots from Obama's State Department that the solution to defeating ISIS is to grant them small business start-up loans here in America. I thought Freepers might appreciate some foreign policy clarity. I found some in a five hundred year old Renaissance Italian treatise. The following is Chapter VI of Book II to Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy: Having discussed how the Romans proceeded in their expansion, we will now discuss how they proceeded in making war, and it will be seen with how much prudence they deviated in all the actions from the universal...

The Last Supper — Leonardo Da Vinci — Photo by: (www.wikipedia.org) ================================================================================ The Last Supper (Il cenacolo) is the famous fresco that Leonardo da Vinci painted between 1495 and 1497. If you go to Milan, you will surely go to the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie to see and enjoy this magnificent work. I want to share with you and investigate the way in which Leonardo chose the models for his works and explain the curious story of Jesus and Judas from da Vinci’s Last Supper. Leonardo took quite a long while to pick the models for his...

The decision by Florida governor Ron DeSantis in 2023 to oust the radicals controlling the state’s tiny liberal-arts college, New College of Florida, has elicited frenzied reactions from the global Left. The effort by a democratically elected government to bring political balance, educational excellence, and fiscal sanity to a failed public institution of 800 students is seen as nothing less than a collegiate March on Rome. The reaction has rather proven the point: The leftist control of higher education has become so totalitarian that even the slightest hint of deviance is viewed as a mortal threat to the revolutionary project....

Arguably no period in European history is as misunderstood as the Middle Ages, which stretched from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE to the rise of the Renaissance roughly 1,000 years later. The myths surrounding this fascinating period of kingdoms and peasants are so prevalent that they led medieval historian Winston Black to write, “The first thing to understand about the Middle Ages… is that they do not actually exist.” The popular perception of life in feudal Europe (exacerbated by Hollywood depictions) is that it was prudish, brutish, and excessively foul, but society was...

The British nobility is divided into tiers or ranks, known as the peerage. The roots of this hierarchical system date back around a thousand years; it began to gain a defined structure (as with many things in British history) after William I conquered England in 1066. The peerage has five ranks: baron, viscount, earl, marquess, and duke, in ascending order. And within each tier, superiority is given to the holder of the oldest peerage. So, for example, the Duke of Devonshire is more senior than the Duke of Marlborough because the former title was created in 1694, eight years before...

This late-medieval document is covered in illustrations of stars and planets, plants, zodiac symbols, naked women, and blue and green fluids. But the text itself – thought to be the work of five different scribes – is enciphered and yet to be understood.In an article published in Social History of Medicine, my coauthor Michelle L. Lewis and I propose that sex is one of the subjects detailed in the manuscript – and that the largest diagram represents both sex and conception.Late-medieval sexology and gynaecologyResearch on the Voynich manuscript has revealed some clues about its origins. Carbon dating provides a 95%...

The 600-year-old document is described as 'the world's most mysterious medieval text.' It is full of illustrations of exotic plants, stars, and mysterious human figures, as well as many pages written in an unknown text. Now, one British academic claims the document is in fact a health manual for a 'well-to-do' lady looking to treat gynaecological conditions.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - It was a great legend while it lasted, but DNA testing has finally ended a century-old story of the Hawaiian arrow carved from the bone of British explorer Captain James Cook who died in the Sandwich Islands in 1779. "There is no Cook in the Australian Museum," museum collection manager Jude Philp said on Thursday in announcing the DNA evidence that the arrow was not made from Cook's bone. But that will not stop the museum from continuing to display the arrow in its exhibition, "Uncovered: Treasures of the Australian Museum," which does include a feather cape...

Medieval fire arrows were real! So I followed the old books, made some and tested them in every way I could think of. We have loads of old manuscripts, pictures, drawings, fire arrow heads and recipes of fire arrows but because some people haven't looked at the old information and can't make them work, lots of people think they were a myth. You see them everywhere in films and computer games so it is easy to dismiss them as a modern popular culture affectation - they were as real as you are. So this film is an exhaustive description of...

Massive fire at Copenhagen's stock exchange building.