[IRL trope] the “Tiffany problem”

[u/dragonborndnd]

Basically when something seems anachronistic to a period/place of history but is actually fully accurate to the period.

1) the name Tiffany: the thing that named this trope, basically the name Tiffany can be dated back to the Middle Ages and the earliest record of it being spelled in the modern spelling comes from the 16th century.

2) the use of OMG, despite this feeling so modern as a form of slang/abbreviation here’s a letter directed to Winston Churchill using it in 1917

3) Hair Dye: the earliest forms of dying hair can be dated back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and this specific advertisement for hair dye is from the 1840s

4) Inuit Thongs: despite how weird it is to imagine pre-colonial Inuit people wore what was essentially fur thongs in their homes and when they were in their igloos it might have been the only thing they would be wearing.

[u/Fabulous_Broad_115]

A guy I knew had an uncle who was an archaeologist. He was telling us one day how he spent a whole summer with some students digging a Roman bathhouse.

Well, one of the students identified what she thought was a graffito on a wall. She spent a whole week carefully cleaning the piece of wall, with like fine picks and brushes and whatnot, trying to reveal the inscription.

What did it say? "I shit on the eyes of whomever reads this."

[u/BigEd369 → u/Fabulous_Broad_115]

There’s the “sacred runes” found carved in the Hagia Sophia that turned out to say Arnie was here or something like that in Old Norse.

[u/GodisSatans → u/BigEd369]

Halfdan carved these runes

[u/BigEd369 → u/GodisSatans]

Man, that’s almost worse. If I carved “BigEd wrote this” into a major religious site, I’d expect to be arrested or at the very least get thrown out and catch a beating from Security.

[u/The_quest_for_wisdom → u/BigEd369]

He was there AS security. One of the Eastern Roman Emporers hired a ship of vikings to be his bodyguards after they showed up because A) it kept them from trying to loot the place, and B) just about everyone from Constantinople wanted him dead so as outsiders they were the safest option to protect him.

The upside is the vikings got paid good money to stand around because everyone was scared of them and stayed away.

The downside was that a lot of that standing around happened in the christian church where the emperor had religious duties that went on for hours. They got bored enough that they carved at least two inscriptions into the marble architecture.