Quotulatiousness

June 16, 2020

Plague and the Bronze Age Collapse ~ Dr. Louise Hitchcock

Filed under: Europe, Greece, Health, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Published 16 May 2020

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the series NAUE II SWORDS, GERMS, & IRON brought to us by none other than Dr. Louise Hitchcock and this episode is going to be about plague and the Bronze Age collapse. This episode will also be drawing on modern parallels such as “What Covid-19 Can Tell Us About the Bronze Age (12th cent) Collapse?”

It will dive into the Bronze Age and discuss was plague a contributing factor in decline of the Bronze Age and the birth of the Iron Age? How familiar were the ancient peoples with plague and epidemics and what do the ancient literary sources tell us? From discussing plague in ancient Mesopotamia to the Philistine Plague to a Hittite King who falls prey to a deadly disease we explore new thoughts, theories and research involving a period that we all love and a subject that could not be more relevant and that is plague.

Check out the awesome work of Dr. Hitchcock at these links below!

Academia profile where you can access her work that is free to the public. https://unimelb.academia.edu/LouiseHi…

Get her books here!

Aegean Art and Architecture: https://global.oup.com/ukhe/product/a…
Minoan Architecture: A Contextual Analysis: http://www.astromeditions.com/books/b…
Theory for Classics: https://www.routledge.com/Theory-for-…
DAIS: The Aegean Feast https://www.peeters-leuven.be/detail….
Tell It In Gath: Studies in the History and Archaeology of Israel. Essays in Honor of Aren M. Maeir on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday https://www.zaphon.de/epages/83179382…

Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ashlarblocks

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Image credits: Manna Nader, Gabana Studios Cairo

Hittite 3D City and intro footage credits: 3D reconstruction of Imperial Hittite Karkemish by Giampaolo Luglio, Turco-Italian Archaeological Expedition to Karkemish directed by Nicolò Marchetti (University of Boologna)

KARKEMISH (Carchemish) 1300 BC (3D) – The Southern Capital of the Empire Hittite https://youtu.be/RsTdoY__F4U

Music Attribution: Herknungr – Megaliths | Dark Neolithic Meditive Shamanic Ambient Music https://youtu.be/oc8FQwNjPu0

Footage of Ugarit Credit goes to Ruptly. Video Title : Syria: Ancient city of Ugarit freed from Islamic State control https://youtu.be/XKzbk0PFvg0

Andrew Sullivan on Puritanism in the Current Year

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Sullivan wonders if there’s any room for debate any more:

Portrayal of the burning of copies of William Pynchon’s book The Meritous Price of Our Redemption by early colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who saw his book as heresy; it was the first-ever banned book in the New World and only 4 original copies are known to survive today.
Engraving by F.T. Merrill in The History of Springfield for the Young by Charles Barrows, 1921.

In the last couple of weeks, as the purges of alleged racists have intensified in every sphere, and as so many corporations, associations, and all manner of civic institutions have openly pledged allegiance to anti-racism, with all the workshops, books, and lectures that come with it, I’m reminded of a Václav Havel essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”

It’s about the dilemma of living in a world where adherence to a particular ideology becomes mandatory. In Communist Czechoslovakia, this orthodoxy, with its tired slogans, and abuse of language, had to be enforced brutally by the state, its spies, and its informers. In America, of course, with the First Amendment, this is impossible. But perhaps for that very reason, Americans have always been good at policing uniformity by and among themselves. The puritanical streak of shaming and stigmatizing and threatening runs deep. This is the country of extraordinary political and cultural freedom, but it is also the country of religious fanaticism, moral panics, and crusades against vice. It’s the country of The Scarlet Letter and Prohibition and the Hollywood blacklist and the Lavender Scare. The kind of stifling, suffocating, and nerve-racking atmosphere that Havel evokes is chillingly recognizable in American history and increasingly in the American present.

The new orthodoxy — what the writer Wesley Yang has described as the “successor ideology” to liberalism — seems to be rooted in what journalist Wesley Lowery calls “moral clarity.” He told Times media columnist Ben Smith this week that journalism needs to be rebuilt around that moral clarity, which means ending its attempt to see all sides of a story, when there is only one, and dropping even an attempt at objectivity (however unattainable that ideal might be). And what is the foundational belief of such moral clarity? That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start, that, as Lowery put it in The Atlantic, “the justice system — in fact, the entire American experiment — was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality.” (Wesley Lowery objected to this characterization of his beliefs — read his Twitter thread about it here.)

This is an argument that deserves to be aired openly in a liberal society, especially one with such racial terror and darkness in its past and inequality in the present. But it is an argument that equally deserves to be engaged, challenged, questioned, interrogated. There is truth in it, truth that it’s incumbent on us to understand more deeply and empathize with more thoroughly. But there is also an awful amount of truth it ignores or elides or simply denies.

It sees America as in its essence not about freedom but oppression. It argues, in fact, that all the ideals about individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, and the equality of all human beings were always a falsehood to cover for and justify and entrench the enslavement of human beings under the fiction of race. It wasn’t that these values competed with the poison of slavery, and eventually overcame it, in an epic, bloody civil war whose casualties were overwhelmingly white. It’s that the liberal system is itself a form of white supremacy — which is why racial inequality endures and why liberalism’s core values and institutions cannot be reformed and can only be dismantled.

This view of the world certainly has “moral clarity.” What it lacks is moral complexity. No country can be so reduced to one single prism and damned because of it. American society has far more complexity and history has far more contingency than can be jammed into this rubric. No racial group is homogeneous, and every individual has agency. No one is entirely a victim or entirely privileged. And we are not defined by black and white any longer; we are home to every race and ethnicity, from Asia through Africa to Europe and South America.

Legends Summarized: The Journey To The West (Part VI)

Filed under: Books, China, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 14 Dec 2018

JOURNEY TO THE WEST KAI, EPISODE 3: FAMILY FEUD!

Action! Excitement! Faces from the past! Kuan Yin discovers an exciting new acupuncture technique! Pigsy is unexpectedly skilled at CPR!

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QotD: A thumbnail history of the English language

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Humour, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Languages are anything but static. Some change very slowly, like French — which owes much of its ponderousness to a government department specifically tasked with rooting out heretic words that creep in from the outside. Other languages undergo periods of very rapid change — the English of Chaucer (late 1300s) would be very confusing to Shakespeare (late 1500s and early 1600s). Two hundred years seems like a long period of time, but in the history of an entire country, it’s a drop in the bucket.

English doesn’t just borrow words; it lifts whole phrases and grammatical ideas from other languages without so much as a by-your-leave. With the coming of the Saxons to Britain, Germanic languages crashed headlong into Brythonic and became Old English. Then the Vikings went for a multi-century beer run starting in the late 700s and left behind a bunch of Norse words, because who doesn’t invent a new language every time they go out carousing? In 1066, William the Bastard decided he didn’t like his name, and brought Norman French with him when he went to the town clerk’s office to have his name legally changed to William the Conqueror.

For the next two hundred years, the English upper classes spoke French and the lower classes spoke a zillion dialects of Middle English (travel was difficult for poor people, so regional variations survived). All legal business was done in French, which was often translated on the spot into Latin for the official records. A person couldn’t even submit a legal plea in English until 1362. But with the start of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337, Edward III decided that speaking French was très passé, and began encouraging English as a spoken and written language, with a little French thrown in, just to keep things interesting. And ever since, English has been debating how sophisticated it wants to be, while making rude gestures across the Channel at France and grumbling when the French sneer northwards.

Blake Smith, “A Brief History of English and Why it Matters”, Mad Genius Club, 2018-03-07.

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