Here is a thread recapping #palindrome history week for #TweetHistorians, courtesy of Mark Saltveit who reverts to @taoish now.

Monday, we started with a thread on the ancient sacred origins of palindromes as spells, curses and words of the gods.

https://twitter.com/Tweetistorian/status/1541957956941631490

1/7 -ms Tuesday: Sotades the Obscene, inventor of palindromes, the Priapeia, sotadean metre and so much more. Also: the kinaidoi (effeminate dancers of Alexandria), Arsinoe the sex-positive proto-feminist queen, incestual royal marriage and sick burns. 2/7 -ms

https://twitter.com/Tweetistorian/status/1541957956941631490

Day 6 of palindromic #TwitterHistorian @taoish Mark Saltveit's stint. Yesterday, the SATOR / ROTAS square. Today, "versus recurrentes" = Latin palindromic poetry, mostly 1 line. At #IMC2021, I argued that it was a continuous & self-referential genre from 2nd-15th c. CE.
1/12 -ms

https://twitter.com/Tweetistorian/status/1543207584634736640

I listed 42 but documenting is tricky. These were rarely in main texts. Most appeared in margins or on fly leaves, but repeated over the centuries. Theory: these were transmitted by teachers, esp. of scribes, and passed via wax tablets, memory & pen tests (federproben).
2/12 -ms

Day 4 of #TweetHistorian Mark Saltveit @taoish's look at #palindromes. Thursday we viewed palindromic forms in non-European languages, a sadly neglected topic. "Today": the SATOR / ROTAS square, attested 4x in the first c. CE: 3x at Pompeii, 1x at Conimbriga in Portugal. 1/12 -ms

https://twitter.com/Tweetistorian/status/1542623764348866560

It's the Hollywood celebrity of #palindromes, thx to Chris Nolan's film TENET. It starts at an OPERA. ROTAS is the time reversal machine. TENET is the name of the conspiracy. Andrei SATOR is the villain. Thomas AREPO is an art forger we never see. 2/12 -ms beyondwordplay.com/palindromes-at…

Day 7.

Let's try to tie this all together. Yesterday, we looked at how the spread of monotheism to South Arabia impacted its political sphere. Today, let's take a look at South Arabia during the early Islamic period.

~ik Yesterday I mentioned how the Ethiopian Aksumites invaded South Arabia and installed a local Christian ruler. Around 530 AD, it was followed by that of the Ethiopian general ʾAbraha.

However, ʾAbraha made sure to follow in the footsteps of his Himyaritic predecessors.

~ik

Day 6.

Yesterday, we looked at what the Amirite and Himyarite inscriptions tell us about the linguistic landscape of South Arabia in the late pre-Islamic period.

Now, let's look at the socio-political environment during the same period.

~ik The 3rd century AD saw an intensification of relations between South Arabia and the Mediterranean/Levant. These statues depicting the Himyaritic rulers Ḏamarʿalī Yuhabirr and his son, Ṯaʾban are a fantastic example of this cultural exchange.

~ik

Day 5 – slightly delayed.

Today, let's look more at the Himyarites and the language of their inscriptions. They reveal some more important clues about South Arabia's linguistic landscape during the late pre-Islamic period. ~ik The Himyarites became the main political force in S-A around 300 AD. Around 280 AD, the Himyarite ruler Yāsir Yuhanʿim conquered the Sabaeans; his successor Šammar Yuharʿiš took parts of Ḥaḍramawt. By the early 4th century all of Ḥaḍramawt had been conquered ~ik

Back for day 4!
Yesterday, we saw how the inscriptions of the different South Arabian states show the region's linguistic diversity.

Today, we're going to look at the first evidence of Arabic and the importance of the Himyarites.

Link to day 3:

https://twitter.com/Tweetistorian/status/1526925319902568448

~ik Around 200 BC, the Minaean state collapsed. This was likely due to both ecological and economic changes in the region.

The Minaeans' homeland, the Jawf, saw the arrival of a new group of settlers: the North Arabian tribe of ʾAmīr (ʾmr(m), also known as the Amirites. ~ik

It's time for day 3!

Yesterday, I talked about the spread of writing to South Arabia and how it was adopted by its states. Today, we're going to be looking what the inscriptions of these states tell us about S-A's linguistic diversity.

Day 2:

https://twitter.com/Tweetistorian/status/1526603993287385090

~ik On Monday, I talked about S-A's social strata and the difference between the highlands and lowlands. The first S-A states were all founded along several wadis in the lowlands, around the edges of a desert known as the Sayhad. ~ik

Day two!

Yesterday, we talked about how South Arabia's situation and climatological environment make it such a distinct region. Today, we're going to look at South Arabia more as a cultural unit, by looking at writing. ~ik Writing was probably introduced to S-A (South Arabia) through trade with the Levant. It, like most other writing systems of the Middle-East, was derived from the proto-Canaanitic alphabet ~ik

Hi, everyone! This week, I (@koutchoukalimar) will take over this account to talk about Late Antique South Arabia. Specifically, I'm going to talk about how looking at language change can shed light on how South Arabia became a part of the Islamic world. ~ik What is the problem?
Briefly stated: between the years 570 and 750 there are virtually no contemporaneous sources that can tell us about South Arabia's history. In fact, the great historian of Yemen G. Rex Smith calls this "one of the greatest frustrations". ~ik

🧵4 by @BennoWeiner for #TweetHistorians @HistoryCMU

In recent years, China under Xi Jinping seems to have embraced a "second-generation ethnic policy," the latest iteration of a century+long effort to find a formula that can forge a nation-state out of the ashes of empire. 1/ Since the 1911 revolution that toppled the Manchu Qing Empire, Chinese statesmen no matter their political stripes have been near unanimous in claiming the territorial extent of the old empire as natural boundaries of the new nation. 1/

(late) 🧵3 by @BennoWeiner for #TweetHistorians @HistoryCMU

When the CCP came to power in 1949 it insisted that China was a single, inseparable, multi-nationality state. But it also admitted that this vision of national unity was not reflective of reality on the ground. 1/ Instead inter-community relations in many ethnocultural borderlands were marked by alienation, distrust, and violence. Party leaders made clear who was to blame. Ethnic DIS-unity was a legacy of what (borrowing from the USSR) they called 'Great Han chauvinism' (da Hanzu zhuyi) 2/

For today’s daily dose of women mystics in medieval Islam, we’ll be looking at marriage, sex, and inter-gender relations between pious Sufi men and women. Let’s see what Hasan al-Basri has to say about his religious sessions with the famous woman mystic Rābi’a al-‘Adawiyya 🧵~mq ‘I was with Rābi‘a for one full day and night. I was talking about the Path and the Truth in such a way that the thought ‘I am a man’ never crossed my mind, nor did ‘I am a woman’ ever cross hers. In the end when I got up, I considered myself a pauper and her a devotee.’

Thanks to #TweetHistorians for the chance to talk about some of my work on gender and medieval Islamic mysticism this week! Let’s jump right in with some choice words from a 10th-century woman mystic, who has the following to say about that elusive concept of ‘manliness’ 🧵 ~mq "Ḥusayn b. Manṣūr Ḥallāj had a beautiful sister who claimed the rank of manhood on the Sufi way. Whenever she came to Baghdad, she covered half her face with a veil and left the other half unveiled. An eminent person saw her and asked, ‘Why don’t you veil your entire face?’

🧵Four by @ChawlaSwati

1/ 🚨🚨Who is a #Tibetan?🚨🚨

Relatedly,
❓Where is #Tibet?
❓Are all Tibetans #Buddhist?
❓Do all of them revere @DalaiLama?
❓Are there Tibetans (other than #exiled pop"n) outside Tibet?
❓Do all #Tibetans identify as... erm ..Tibetan?

#TweetHistorians 2/ The 11th Zurmang Trungpa (1939-87) said #Tibetan 'insiders' (ནང་པ་) share these common features:

☑️speaking some variant of Tibetan lang
☑️following #Buddhist faith
☑️eating tsampa (roasted barley flour)

Who was he?
treasuryoflives.org/biographies/vi…

A handy definition, but...

~SC

🧵Three by @ChawlaSwati

1/ On Tibetan Buddhist Nuns in Exile:

#OnThisDay @DalaiLama was awarded #NobelPeacePrize, the only #Buddhist religious leader thus honored (#MLK nominated @thichnhathanh in '67).

Many associate #Tibet w/ him+ other monks in red robes--

What about nuns?

https://twitter.com/Tweetistorian/status/1469028502292733954

2/ "Some feminists from the West cud accuse me by saying, ‘The #DalaiLama is the authority but he doesn’t help the nuns.’"

Yes, @DalaiLama has often faced the accusation that the #TibetanBuddhist tradition doesn't give nuns the same rights as monks.

info-buddhism.com/Interview_Dala…

~SC

🧵Two by @ChawlaSwati

1/ On #Tibet in the Indian imagination:

Yesterday, we looked at how #Tibetans perceived India+ how the @DalaiLama walked in the path of many of his countrymen before him when he came into exile in India.

Let's turn the gaze in the other direction today. 2/ Indians have at least two vantage points from where to view #Tibet. Parts of #Himalayan India border Tibet👇. Thanks to older connections of religious patronage, pilgrimage, and trade, the perspective from these regions is often v. diff from the capital in New Delhi.
~SC

🧵One by @ChawlaSwati

On the @DalaiLama & India:
1/ Many of us know that the 14th @DalaiLama has been living in #exile in #Himalayan town of #Dharamsala in northern India since 31 Mar 1959.

Why India?
Was he blazing a trail w/ his escape?

#TweetHistorians
Map from @TIME (1959) 2/ Second question first: No, he wasn't.

In coming to India, the @DalaiLama trod the path of many #Tibetans before him-- traders+ aristocrats, monastics+ laity, and his predecessor, the 13th #DalaiLama, Thupten Gyatso, who had lived in exile in British India from 1910-12.

--SC

Hi all, @mediaevalrevolt here, putting up my last #Tweethistorian thread today, this one on how the #Jacquerie ended and how people remembered (and forgot) it afterward. - jfb When the cities abandoned the Jacques, the nobles' vengeance took free rein. They burned whole villages and slaughtered the innocent along with the guilty. Widows search for the bodies of their husbands to give them proper burial - jfb

Welcome to #Tweethistorian 🧵4 by @mediaevalrevolt on the #Jacquerie. I am making Thanksgiving dinner (in Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿) today and it's going to look exactly like this: In the meantime, let me tell you about who actually joined the #Jacquerie and how they did and did not get along. Here I'm drawing from my article in Speculum last year and ch. 7 of my book. - jfb
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…

Welcome to 🧵3 in this week’s #Jacquerie posts by @mediaevalrevolt . Today I'll talk rebel organization
Medieval revolts often look like undirected mob fury, but most, including the Jacquerie, had formal leadership directing the action - jfb In the #Jacquerie many villages chose local captains to lead them. Local captains reported to a 'General Captain of the Countryside' named Guillaume Calle. The locations of some of these captains and their movements are shown in blue here. - jfb