Humbaba!

Missing pieces of the Epic of Gilgamesh found! Open Culture says: That’s a pretty good deal for these extra lines that not only add to the poem’s length, but have now cleared up some of the mysteries in the other chapters. These lines come from Chapter Five of the epic and cast...

How many at the combat of 30?

As many of my readers know, there was an arranged battle or deed of arms between two garrisons in Brittany in March 1352. The garrison commanders supported different claimants for the ducal title. The civil war was part of the wider Hundred Years War between rival claimants to the kingdom of France, and like the wider war it was going no place. Out of boredom or frustration,...

The sounds of the past

I stumbled across two interesting blog posts this past week, both concerned with recovering or reconstructing ancient languages. Back in 2010, Open Culture ran a piece on ancient Akkadian (an early Mesopotamian language, one of the first written down anywhere). A short piece of the Epic of Gilgamesh was included. Have a look! And while you are at it, read up on the completion...

If you are really interested in Viking archaeology...

or early medieval Poland, consider this:Buko, Andrzej, ed. Bodzia. A Late Viking-Age Elite Cemetery in Central Poland. East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Pp. xxxi, 624. $293.00. ISBN: 978-90-04-27829-5.A lavish and detailed work aimed at a wide audience, published even before the excavation report. But the publishers have narrowed...

Reading some classics

Currently my reading time is my own. I am taking advantage of that to reread, or read for the first time, some books that I consider classics. Some of it is old science-fiction that I kept when most of my book collection was dispersed on my recent move. For instance, I reread the...

Elections and the electorate in Russia and the United States

I was very impressed by this interview in the journal Foreign Policy. The interviewee was the young journalist Evgeny Feldman, who struck me as intelligent, systematic, and sensible. As a result I found his description of the elections in both the United States and Russia to be useful.It's worth thinking about how elections work in various countries in this kind of detail. Some...