Silphion, studded leather, and why Saudi Arabia wasn't sanctioned: six answers from r/AskHistorians, September 13-27, 2026

Between September 13 and September 27, 2026, the most-upvoted questions on r/AskHistorians asked how long money can sit in an account, which food plants the ancient world lost, what the surviving sources can say about boys in Greek and Roman sexual relationships, why Jewishness behaves like a people, where a wargame's armour came from, and why Washington left Riyadh off its sanctions list after 9/11. Six entries follow, each carrying the answerer's handle, the answer's score, and every source the answer names.

Four of the six answers name published books, a primary text, or an official report. Two argue from institutional and social history and cite no published literature; each entry says which kind it is, so the reasoning can be weighed on its own terms.

Upvote counts are readings taken on September 27, 2026; they measure the interest a question had drawn by that point. The subreddit's own newsletter for September 26 lists four of these questions among the most-upvoted of the fortnight, which is the ranking this issue follows 1.

The record retrieved for this issue carries a handle and a score for every answer, and leaves the flair field blank. Where an entry would benefit from a credential, that blank is the whole available answer: a handle and an upvote count identify a contribution on Reddit, and they stand apart from any account of the writer's training.

"What is the oldest possible point in history you could deposit something of value and receive interest from it, today?" went up on September 24 and stood at 2,041 points when retrieved, with 80 comments on the thread 2.

IrationalFear answered, and the reply carried 1,225 points, by far the highest score on the thread 3.

The time-traveller version of the question breaks on identity, because an account belongs to a particular person and four centuries of descendants cannot present themselves as one depositor. The answer swaps the traveller for a line of descendants who keep reinvesting the deposit, then asks which institution could have held it that long 3.

A custodian has to clear four hurdles: physical survival, continued solvency, an interest-paying financial system that lasts, and honouring a very old contract through buyouts and mergers. Two French mints have operated since the 800s, and their business was minting; the deposit account this question needs belongs to a later kind of institution. The next candidate is older than the rest of the field and still trading. Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena began in 1472 as a mount of piety, a church-endorsed charitable lender and pawnshop, and became a bank of the modern kind in 1624, when the grand duchy of Tuscany incorporated it. That 1624 restructuring leaves 402 years between a deposit made then and a withdrawal now 3.

The answer also sets aside a rival. The Bank of Parma, formed in 1488, held interest to a minimum under an anti-usury policy, and its founder, Bernardine of Feltre, spent his later years campaigning to expel Jews from the region, including by circulating blood-libel accusations 3.

The reply names institutions, founding dates and policies, and cites no published literature.

"Have there been foods that went extinct that we know tasted good?" was posted on September 24 and had 1,363 points and 109 comments when retrieved 4.

KiwiHellenist answered with the case of silphion, and the reply reached 735 points 5.

Silphion was native to Cyrene, and it was valuable enough to that city's economy to be stamped on its coins. Ancient writers describe a thick root eighteen inches long, a tuber above ground with a stalk like giant fennel, golden leaves shaped like celery or parsley, and seed heads as wide as the leaves. The stalk went into the pot as a vegetable, and the juice was the real export: preserved with bran or bean flour, shipped out, and used as a garnish. Pliny's Natural History describes the taste as pungent without being unpleasant and notes that it made a first-time taster sweat, which the answer reads as a sign of heat or mild toxicity 5.

Its celebrity today comes from a reputation as an abortifacient, and the answer treats that reputation as unproven: the recipes naming silphion were written after the plant had already disappeared from the record. Extinction came around the first century BCE, once silphion caught on in Rome and was harvested and stockpiled at scale. Pliny reports that in 49 BCE Julius Caesar released 1,500 pounds of it from the Roman treasury after the Cyrenaic supply dried up during the civil war, and by the time Pliny was writing in the mid-first century CE the plant was gone. Mediterranean fennels took its place, and contemporary opinion rated them worse 5.

A proposal published in recent years identifies Ferula drudeana, a plant found in central Türkiye, as a possible surviving silphion imported from Cyrene in antiquity. KiwiHellenist judged the identification possible and unproved, and pointed to physical details that differ from the ancient descriptions 5.

The primary source is Pliny's Natural History 19.38–45, and the answer illustrates the civic coinage with a silphion-stamped Cyrenaic coin from the Natural History Museum's collection. An earlier AskHistorians answer by the same writer covers the Ferula drudeana question at length.

"Did pederasty cause trauma in greek and roman boys similar to how a lot of modern kids would experience and express trauma?" was posted on September 14 and had 1,277 points and 116 comments when retrieved 6.

JamesCoverleyRome answered, and the reply carried 2,612 points, the highest-scored answer of the fortnight 7.

The answer opens on the shape of the evidence. Everything surviving from the ancient world on this subject was written by adult male citizens for other adult male citizens, and it records the older partner's desire, courtship and self-justification. The younger partner's own account of the relationship is absent from that record, in Athens and in Rome alike. JamesCoverleyRome sets the consequence out himself: the surviving record leaves the modern question of trauma open, and he declines to diagnose from a distance, describing "trauma" as a twentieth-century clinical category and himself as a historian rather than a psychologist 7.

Greek practice, at least in Athens, ran along carefully drawn lines. The idealised pair was an adult citizen, the erastes, and a freeborn adolescent of the citizen class, the eromenos. The relationship was public and regulated, with the older man cast as educator and patron and a great deal of attention paid to protecting the boy's standing. Convention expected the boy to yield out of gratitude or admiration, and a boy who sought the passive role for his own pleasure was seen as breaking the rules. "Boy" covered roughly puberty to eighteen, and the word marked social standing as much as age 7.

Roman practice turned on penetration, with the partner's gender a secondary matter. A free adult man could penetrate anyone of lower status without losing standing; to be penetrated degraded a man, which put a free adult male out of bounds as a passive partner. The decisive difference was social standing, with age as a secondary measure. Caesar's youthful stay with King Nicomedes IV followed him for years as taunts about being "a woman". The answer applies the same reasoning to Hadrian and Antinous: the record preserves Hadrian's grief in statues, a city and a constellation, and preserves nothing of what Antinous thought 7.

What the answer does conclude is that these relationships rested on a footing of extreme inequality, and that the inequality was the point of them. The reply analyses poetry, philosophy, epigraphy and dialogue, and names none of those sources 7.

"How come Jews are an ethnicity while Christians and Muslims are not?" was posted on September 22 and had 1,196 points and 337 comments when retrieved 8.

ummmbacon answered, and the reply carried 953 points and closes with a fourteen-book reading list 9.

The premise that religion is a private matter of belief is a post-Enlightenment Western arrangement. Judaism formed in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Near East, where religion sat inside personal, family, clan, peoplehood and political identity at once, well before anyone had a concept of race or genetics. Members of the group can come from Ethiopia, India, China, the Maghreb, southwest Asia, Greece and Europe and still count as Jewish by Jewish standards. Converts have always made up a small share of the whole, which is why Jewish communities around the world share ancient Levantine ancestry 9.

Separation was maintained through practice: dietary rules, endogamy, circumcision and a distinct worship. The answer places those rules in their regional setting, noting that ancient Egyptians avoided particular foods as well. The Babylonian exile was the turning point. Ezekiel supplied the theological framework for worshipping without a Temple while displaced from the land, and the category of ger, or convert, took shape in that world. A convert who completes a recognised conversion becomes fully Jewish, and someone born Jewish stays Jewish through unbelief, which is where membership by faith in Christianity and Islam diverges 9.

The answer lines up three parallels for that structure. Coptic Christians hold a similar position under the dhimmi status Islamic law imposed on them. Catholic canon law keeps the doctrine of character indelebilis, the permanent sacramental character conferred by baptism, which leaves a baptised Catholic who has apostatised a Catholic. The Druze follow the same logic and accept no converts. Forced baptism under duress, as in Germany in 1096 or the Spanish riots of 1391, left the converts Jewish in Jewish law 9.

Two later developments hardened the boundary. Theodosius II's codification in the early fifth century made converting a Christian to Judaism a capital offence, and Byzantine and medieval Christian legal codes tightened that rule; Islamic apostasy provisions blocked movement in the other direction. Outside pressure then did the rest. Ghettos and legal exclusion kept Jewish communities endogamous, and Nazi racial law mapped a heritable category onto a structure that already existed. On the origin of that racial thinking, the answer cites Geraldine Heng and María Elena Martínez, who traced modern racial classification back to the limpieza de sangre statutes and medieval thinking about Jews 9.

The reading list: Kenton Sparks, Ethnicity and Identity in Ancient Israel; Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God; Shaye Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness; Daniel Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile; Martin Goodman, Mission and Conversion; Louis Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World; Scot McKnight, A Light Among the Gentiles; David Novak, The Image of the Non-Jew in Judaism; Amnon Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation; Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross; Kenneth Stow, Alienated Minority; Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews; Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages; and María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions. The writer also links his earlier answer on Jewish continuity 9.

"In games like DnD, there is a type of armor called 'Studded Leather'. If this isn't a historically accurate type of armor, where did the notion come from?" was posted on September 18 and had 1,094 points and 71 comments when retrieved 10.

jbdyer answered, and the reply carried 1,098 points, above the question's own score 11.

Gary Gygax, the co-originator of Dungeons & Dragons, published an article in the April 1971 issue of Panzerfaust that lists the armour references he worked from: Charles Ashdown's Armour and Weapons of the Middle Ages (1925), European Arms and Armour (1907), British and Foreign Arms and Armour (1909), John Hewitt's Ancient Armour and Weapons in Europe (1855–60), and George Cameron Stone's Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor (1934). By 1971 those books were decades old, and Gygax paired them with the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Older sources meant the article carried forward ideas that later research discarded, among them "ring mail", the notion that mail was made of interlocking rings, which Claude Blair's European Armour (1958) helped finish off 11.

In that article, studded leather appears as leg protection under a hauberk, and Gygax discusses brigandine separately, as "splinted armor". The word had printed life before Gygax. A 1904 book contrasts steel-plate gloves with "the ring-mail or studded leather common at an earlier date", and an article on fourteenth-century arms in The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Review discusses studded armour and prints a woodcut of the Bavarian knight Heinrich von Seinsheim in what the writer took for leather with studs 11.

Studded leather then took the long way into the game. Chainmail and the original Dungeons & Dragons rules both left it out; ring mail entered the hobby through Tunnels & Trolls in 1975. Both armours appear in D&D's 1977 Monster Manual, on wood elves, six years after the article that named them. The historian Jon Peterson reads the growth of the armour list as an attempt to stay competitive with rival systems that kept adding content 11.

The answer's citations run beyond the article itself to the historian Jon Peterson's reading of Gygax's armour list and his book Playing at the World, and, for the reprinted Panzerfaust text, Tondro's collection The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970–1977, where the article begins on page 47. It also links the 1904 volume, the Gentleman's Magazine article, the Seinsheim depiction, and a history of armour in Tunnels & Trolls 11.

"Why didn't Saudi Arabia get sanctioned by the USA for 9/11 when other countries got sanctioned for much less?" was posted on September 17 and had 1,079 points, 65 comments and an upvote ratio of 0.90 when retrieved 12.

Anekdota-Press answered with a version of an earlier reply of his, and the answer carried 52 points 13.

"The Saudis" covers a lot of ground: a kingdom of about 22 million people in 2001, with competing ministries, factions inside the government, and groups outside it entirely. Centrally directed Saudi policy supported American counterterrorism through the 1990s, and the government stripped Osama bin Laden of his citizenship and froze his finances and inheritance. That cooperation ran alongside domestic controversy over the American troop presence that began in 1990 and continued at a reduced scale until 2003 13.

Riyadh also kept its counterterrorism to itself. The government handled its negotiations with Sudan over bin Laden's deportation directly, and American officials were kept away from detainees such as the financier Madani al-Tayyib in 1998. Official policy and popular sentiment pulled in different directions, since sympathy for al-Qaeda was common among the Saudi public, the clergy and, by the answer's account, some individuals inside the government 13.

The finding that settled the sanctions question came from the 9/11 Commission, which reported "no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded [Al Qaeda]." Most of al-Qaeda's financing is still thought to have originated in Saudi Arabia, where charitable giving ran on a large scale with light oversight. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi nationals, as was bin Laden himself 13.

Later document releases complicated that official line. Files released in 2022 showed Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then Saudi ambassador to Washington, and his wife sending $140,000 to the wife of Osama Basnan, who passed the funds to Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi intelligence agent living in San Diego who gave repeated support to two of the hijackers. The FBI put the chance that al-Bayoumi knew about the plot beforehand at "50/50", and an FBI report stated that al-Bayoumi and a second Saudi consular employee may have taken direction from a more senior diplomat in Washington, Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah. The evidence stops at circumstantial connections to individuals 13.

Two sources back the answer: Kean and Hamilton's The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Government Printing Office, 2004), and D. B. Ottaway's "Saudi Arabia Faces the Missing 28 Pages" in the Wilson Center's Viewpoints 102 13.

The fortnight's highest-scoring question went unanswered. "What date is the furthest back in time we can definitively trace an event to?" reached 3,202 points and 226 comments after it went up on September 22, and the subreddit's newsletter lists it among the questions still waiting for one 14. It opens the quick scan with that note and carries no entry here, because an entry needs an answer to describe.

Two of the six answers here argue from institutional and social history and cite no published literature: the one on the oldest surviving deposit account names institutions and dates, and the one on pederasty works through ancient genres without naming them. Both are marked in their entries so a reader can weigh the reasoning itself. The remaining four carry source trails, reproduced in the entry that used them.

Scores came from records read on September 27, 2026, and they move as threads age.