Tea at Trianon: The Oldest Leather Shoe

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, October 29, 2017

The Oldest Leather Shoe

From Vintage News:

The life span of high-quality leather shoes can be increased if one takes proper care of the material. But, we must ask, increased by how much? Maybe by up to 50 years? A Century? A Millennium? How about 5,500 years? Yes, you read that correctly, because the world’s oldest leather shoe is 5,500 years old. It predates Stonehenge, is much older than the Egyptian pyramids and the shoe found on Ötzi the Iceman.

To say that this leather shoe is well preserved might not be sufficient to describe its condition, as it looks astonishingly good. In fact, it was in such good condition that the archaeologists who discovered it thought that the shoe could not be more than 700 years old. They initially thought that the shoe probably dated back to a later civilization, most likely the Mongol period, who used caves in the 14th century.

However, examining the material in the two radiocarbon laboratories in Oxford and California produced surprising results and proved that the primary assumptions made by the archaeologists were not even close to what the laboratories showed. It was stated that it was 5,637 to 5,387 years old and archaeologists who worked on the site in Armenia simply couldn’t believe that a shoe could be so ancient. (Read more.)