Shape-shifting Blacksmiths
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Tag Archives: history
The Sea Peoples,….
On this day in 53 B.C…..
A large Roman army commanded by Marcus Licinius Crassus was defeated by a numerically inferior Parthian force under Surenas near Carrhae in northern Syria. From Rogueclassicism.
Iron and Steel…
Writing history
I have been reading The Sea Peoples, another book about the widespread destruction at the end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean. From page 173:
There is a dangerous temptation to link destruction levels together in the interests of tidiness and economy, but history is seldom tidy or notably economical, however it may be with philosophy. This is one of the reasons why history should not be written by philosophers or sociologists.
70 years ago today…
A Royal Funeral
Sleuthing around the Great Death-Pit
In Ur, royal families ordered the violent deaths of dozens of young courtiers and servants so that they might continue to serve dead kings and queens in the afterlife.
So enough complaining about the Royal Wedding. Long before there was a Kate Middleton, long before there was a Princess Diana coyly courting the cameras and a Bertie Windsor wrestling with a stammer, there were royal families whose sense of entitlement truly knew no bounds.
The greatest theoretical physicist between Newton and Einstein
Oldest known written record in Europe discovered
A Linear B tablet from between 1450 and 1350 B.C.
His/Her Story: A landed woman
From the Elephantine archives, the first historical documentation of a Jewish woman.
The Jewish woman Mibtahiah’s archive contains 10 documents found in superb condition; they reveal surprising details concerning her life and the options available to Jewish women in this settlement.
Mibtahiah never exercised her option to divorce and seemed to have had good relationships with her father and both husbands. This independent homeowner who could afford to accept a symbolic return of a loan to her father might well be the first Jewish woman for whom we have original documentation.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 