How to Die Young in the Middle Ages

If food in the Middle Ages was deadly, I shudder to think of what the medicine was. The Arab doctors were all right. They were having their golden ages when the Europeans were having their dark ages. Arab doctors treated things with similar treatments to what we use today. One particularly terrible doctor from Europe used to treat lung infections by taking the brain out of the skull and rubbing it with salt. That didn't cure the patient. In fact, it probably gave them more sodium than they needed per day. (:

The medicines were fairly unpleasant. The cure for a stuffed up nose was to stuff mustard and onions up the nose. For bruises, they would apply a bandage of bacon fat and flour. That couldn't have been too bad, but then again, I've never tried it. Fainting was treated by having the sufferer inhale the smoke of burning feathers. Nowadays we don't recommend this. Ginger was used to treat loss of memory. I don't suggest you try this. Some spices, like nutmeg, are poisonous in large doses.

These cures were for simple things, at a time when the black plague was going around. The doctors weren't even close when it came to treating that! Some remedies included sitting in a sewer, drinking ten-year-old treacle, and eating arsenic powder. The powder would have killed you anyway. It's highly poisonous. One particualrly dumb cure was to walk from town to town beating yourself. I don't think that was such a great idea. It's very painful.

Be glad you don't live in the Middle Ages. You would probably have died from plague or cures for your sore throat long ago.

Foul Food

Food during the Middle Ages was deadly. You could die from drinking a glass of water. Bread was often stretched with sand or cobwebs. The cabbages were so tough you had to boil them all day to make soup. The church did not allow people to eat meat on Fridays, only fish. This is still true for Catholics. Unfortunately, in the Middle Ages, people cheated. They ate large birds called bustards. They also ate beavers, because they could be a sort of fish. (Actually not.) Sugar in the Middle Ages was only for the rich, who ate so much their teeth fell out. (In truth, sugar does not rot your teeth. It's bacteria on the sugar.) Rose flavoring was popular.

The church was not strict when it came alcohol, however. They ran taverns themselves, and used the money to pay for church repairs. Of course, it wasn't really all that nice. Ale was so thick it was like soup. (One king had his brother drowned in a barrel of wine. Ug.) Ale was actually safer than water, so a lot of people drank it.

Well that's all for now. Just be glad you don't live in the Middle Ages!(Or that your mother doesn't stretch her flour with cobwebs.)

Being a Woman in the Middle Ages

People have this idea that women in the Middle Ages were weak, delicate, damsels in distress, etc. Yeah, right. The women worked hard, just as hard as the men. They were also considered less important than men. A woman's "duty" was to get married, have kids, be a loving wife, and help her husband even if he abused and beat her. If they wanted to remain single, they could be nuns or midwives. If they lived in town they could run businesses, though. Women could also be artists, writers, or tradeswomen. Peasant women worked alongside their husbands, although they did different jobs. She sewed, wove, cooked, cleaned, and took care of the children. She also had to have more children to take care of. This was dangerous because the midwives had no concept of hygeine. Twenty percent of the women who died in 1424 (between the ages of twenty-five and thirty) died in childbirth. Most of them had bled to death or suffered infection. According to many religious books, children were nothing but a bother. Having them ruined your figure, you had to clean up after them, etc. These arguments were used to try to get women to become nuns, which you usually couldn't become unless you had money.(You had to pay to be a nun, because nuns were the brides of heaven, and you had to give a substantial dowry.)

Being a Kid in the Middle Ages

Being a child in the Middle Ages would not have been much fun. First, you probably wouldn't have lived too long. Only one child in ten lived to their tenth birthday. The food in the Middle Ages was so bad you could die from drinking a glass of water. It was poor nutrition that killed the kids.(Of course, the sand in their bread might have helped a little.) Children were also more susceptible to the plague. Unfortunately, the priests blamed the children, saying it was because the children occasionally skipped church or disliked their parents.(Why did adults get the plague then, if God was punishing the kids?) Some parents who were beggars would break their children's limbs to help gain sympathy. People would give generously to beggars with twisted, suffering children. It was considered wrong to be too kind to children. One boy would greet his father with, "My right reverent and worshipful father, I praise your good fatherhood in the most humble way possible and humbly beg your good fatherhood for my daily blessing." That might get a little old after a while.(But if you're planning to ask for an increase in your allowance, go ahead. It can't hurt!) And these above treatments were for boys. Girls were forbidden to swear (which I do have to agree with) jerk their shoulders around, or laugh too loud. A poem said that if girls were disobedient they should be whipped. And if you survived long enough, you had to attend school.

Some of the things about school weren't so bad. You didn't have to go if you were a girl. It was thought girls who could write would spend too much time writing love letters. They didn't give out homework, and there was no such thing as a poor speller - you could spell things any way you wanted to.(Or should I say "Anny wae u wantd too"?) But school was, in most ways worse. If you made a mistake, you were beaten. If you knew Latin, you had to speak it. Every word of a different language would earn you a lash. The rules were mostly the same, except for a few things about being punished for ripping up your schoolmate's pillow or throwing the school into disorder.

Well, that's all for now. Be glad you didn't grow up in the Middle Ages!

The Legend of Osiris

The Ancient Egyptians believed in a great many gods. They tried to please the gods because then good things would happen to them. They had Sobek, the god of crocodiles and water supplies. Then they had Bes, the dwarf god of happiness. They also had Re, the sun god. I'm going to talk about a few of the gods. This is an Egyptian legend which I'm sure I've mentioned somewhere. I just hope I didn't tell the entire story.

There once was an Egyptian king named Osiris. He was popular and everyone liked him. Well, almost everyone. His sweet, loving brother, Set, was fairly up-set with the fact everyone liked his brother. Set, being his kind, loving self, had a coffin made. He said that anyone who could fit in it could have it. Of course, Osiris tried to fit in. (And the coffin had been specially built to fit someone. One wonders who, eh?) Take a guess... Do we have a answer? Yes we do! It was Osiris who was supposed to fit the thing. When Osiris climbed in, his brother put the lid on and sealed it with boiling lead. Set, being a thoughtful, caring type, cooled the coffin down by throwing it into the Nile.

Osiris had himself a wife named Isis. She loved him as much as the people loved him. And yes, even more than Set. Isis decided to find the casket so she could bury her beloved husband. That was like looking for a needle in a haystack. But people have found thimbles in burned down houses before!!!!! As usually happens in this sort of story, she found the body. She hid it in the rushes of the Nile before she burried it. Wrong move. Set found it, took the body out, chopped it into pieces, and scattered the bits everywhere- all over the world, in fact. Isis, being the amazing wife she was, located all the pieces and wrapped them in linen. Ta-da! The world's first mummy was made. And Isis, being a good friend of the god Anubis, had the god breathe life into her husband, who entered the afterlife as the god of death, rebirth, the earth and the Underworld.

Unfortunately for the horrid Set, Osiris was a daddy, (although not the world's first.)
His son's name was Horus, and he loved his daddy as much as his mother did. He decided to kill Set. There was a group of battles. Set plucked Horus's eye out! What an evil uncle! But no one really won. And they all got to be gods in the end. Horus became the god who looked after the pharaoh. Isis became the godess who protected the dead. Set became the god of the deserts and storms. So they all got pretty good positions at the end.

Here's some food for thought. The Egyptians believed that at one point the gods had ruled the earth. A few of the gods that could be in this catagory are Osiris, Set, Horus, Shu, Geb, Re, and Ptah. Could the Egyptian gods have been humans at one point, but the information about them had become distorted? Could their graves be waiting for us to uncover them? Osiris's tomb was almost discovered in the 1820's, but the discoverers of the tomb vanished before they got the word out. If you want a little more information on this topic, you can read my blog about King Tut. Or you can read the book "Egyptology" published by Candlewick Press.

Death in Ancient Egypt

The Ancient Egyptians often died before the age of thirty, and they wanted to continue living. So it's not surprising that they believed in an afterlife. The most important parts of your spirit, the Egyptians believed, were your ka and your ba. Your ka was a spirit who looked like you. Your ba was your life force. If you ever see a ba, let me know, and get a picture if you can. I'd love to see it. It's a bird with a man's head so you can be sure if you've seen one. Don't forget to take a picture! And if you didn't have a name, it was as if you had never exsisted. (One wonders about babies who died while being born. What about them?)

The early mummies weren't embalmed: they were buried in the desert sands. This preserved them well. A museum wanted a mummy like this and a clever antique dealer provided one. The mummy had red hair and was nicknamed Ginger. But the dealer was known for providing fakes when he couldn't get the real thing. And the dealer's brother vanished around the same time the mummy appeared. Surely he didn't- I hope.

I think I'll skip over the mummifying process because that stuff was just plain gross. I'll bet grown men faint after seeing brains being forced out through the nostrils. I would. I'll skip over it to a part about tombs, which are, along with pyraminds, the sphinx, mummies and King Tut, a famous part of Ancient Egypt. The rich would have their mummies placed inside a coffin. The very rich would have several coffins. The coffins would be placed in tombs, which were only for the rich. They had burial chambers, and sometimes other chambers, such as chapels where food could be left for the dead person's ka.

The Ancient Egyptians believed that the next life would be like this life. They were buried with food, clothes, and furniture. The pictures on the sides of the walls, actually, served a purpose. They were supposed to be part of what the dead would need in the afterlife. A picture of someone riding, for example, was drawn to ensure that the dead would be able to ride during the afterlife. Also, since the Egyptians believed they would have to work in the afterlife, they were buried with ushabtis, who would do all the work for them.

Well, now you know more about the Ancient Egyptian burial stuff than you thought you'd ever know. But you don't know it all, now, do you? If you find this stuff interesting, you always could look it up. Or, when you die, you can find out whether they were right or not. (I'm leaning toward the "not" side.)

Your DNA

What makes you look different than your brother? DNA. What makes your eyes blue? DNA. What makes your hair so curly it's a waste of time to comb it? DNA. DNA ,makes us different than anyone else. OK, you have about forty secret twins in the world. It's a fact. But still, you are a unique person, created and designed by God. Some people may look like you, but there are probably some differences you don't notice because they're so small. Your DNA is unique to you, though. No one has DNA like yours. Here's an example of how unique you are. If you took one man and one woman (hypothetically speaking) you could have more combinations of genetic information than there are atoms in the universe.

Here is what scientists do to use DNA to solve a crime. They usually don't have too much to work with, DNA being so small, but they probably have something like a piece of hair.
1. Prepare the sample. (That takes a lot of work, but it's too much to go into here.)

2. They divide a special gel into columns, called lanes. They place a DNA sample at the beginning of each lane.

3. An electric current is applied. The DNA fragments move independent of each other. This causes each sample to separate into a series of bands.

4. A match of the DNA is made when the bands in a lane of known and a lane of unknown DNA match. This comparison can be made with a computer or done visually.

As I said earlier, DNA is unique to you. If you ever feel like you look like everyone else, think about that, and remember we're all unique in God's eyes, even if it does feel like we were all made in a photocopy machine.