Talk:Eunuch (court official)

Convention or scientific basis?

I propose a change in the very first lines. My proposal is:

A euneuch is conventionally regarded as a male who has been castrated. Although we find that castration may have served special social functions at times, historical record, archeology, as well as etymology have not been able to give the conventional notion of euneuchs as castrated males a substantial enough basis.

The primarily Byzantine title has equivalents in a number of empires, confederations, and kingdoms. The ordination of the euneuch assuredly has prescribed castration in certain examples. As the intersection of many fields are involved, ranging from anthropology, sociology, hermeneutics, archeology to the history of politics, theology etcetera, it has become clear that the topic of the euneuchs is a controversal one.

At least the first sentence as it stands is wrong. At the time of euneuchs in the Byzantine era, a male could become castrated for a number of reasons, without that implying the castrated person to be a euneuch. The title was not derogatory; although the notion of Scythians as the most euneuchal of societies, may have meant the Scythian peoples valued marriage less, or practiced the economy of pleasure and inheritance differently than the Hellenes and Romans. --Xactnorge (talk) 22:55, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Removal of templates

This talk page was previously at Talk:Eunuch, where an article split occurred, and it seems to have retained the templates that were justified for a talk page at that location. I removed the template {{notforum}}, which I do not think is necessary on this talk page, like it was on Talk:Eunuch. This removal seems self-evident to me (click on the link if you are unfamiliar with the template), so I will not go into it further, unless asked. I also removed the templates {{WikiProject LGBT studies}} and {{WikiProject Sexuality}}. These were placed when the page was at "Talk:Eunuch" instead of "Talk:Eunuch (court official)". In my opinion, this article should be re-evaluated for inclusion in these WikiProjects before the templates are put back. I am not dismissing the importance of this article. I just think that it should be included in WikiProjects that are appropriate for its current content, rather than the content that the eunuch article had before the article split. While it is possible that the LGBT and Sexuality WikiProjects might be interested in this new article, I think that sociological and historical WikiProjects would probably be more interested in it. I left the {{talkheader}} template, even though it is probably more suited for more controversial articles and/or articles that get more traffic. You may remove it, if you want.

I previously added the message box that explains the situation about the talk page archives. You can modify that, too. I used substitution on the template to prevent it from being a burden on Wikipedia's severs, so it is kind of messy. I put HTML comments before and after the code in an attempt to make editing of this page easier. The spacing between {{talkheader}} and the message box is intentional. If the spacing is removed, the boxes are so close together that they look like a single item. Also, I know that the message box has a redundant link. I just added it for the convenience of anyone looking for information about the archived discussions. You may remove it, if you like. If you want to discuss something with me for some reason, please use my talk page to alert me rather than just replying here, as I do not watch this article and my editing on Wikipedia is sporadic. -- Kjkolb (talk) 23:05, 24 August 2012 (UTC)