{"id":25137,"date":"2014-10-22T00:01:10","date_gmt":"2014-10-22T04:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25137"},"modified":"2014-10-19T11:08:09","modified_gmt":"2014-10-19T15:08:09","slug":"qotd-ancient-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/10\/22\/qotd-ancient-history\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Ancient history"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>New interests and different locations are provided by an iPad app that gathers pages relevant to my interests, and lets me indulge particular subjects, like \u201cAncient History.\u201d This gives me the impression I am learning something, and perhaps I am, but when you finish an article about Xobar the Cruel who ruled during the Middle Period of the Crinchothian Empire (140 square miles in modern-day Herzo-Slavbonia) you think \u201cwell, there\u2019s something of which I was previously unaware, and let\u2019s preen for a second about being the sort of person who cares about ancient history,\u201d and then it\u2019s all forgotten. It\u2019s all the history of rulers, which means the history of cruelty, and the remnants of settlements, which means the history of floors and walls and tombs. I fault myself for not having a better grasp on the shadowy beginnings of civilization; it doesn\u2019t snap into focus until the Greeks, and then you\u2019re surprised because they have shoes and religion and government and traditions and the rest of the recognizable pillars that hold up the ceiling mankind builds to put some space between himself and the raging caprices of the gods above. Except for Egypt, where they were doing stuff for a long time, but it was weird.<\/p>\n<p>James Lileks, <a href=\"http:\/\/lileks.com\/bleats\/archive\/14\/0414\/040114.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em>The Bleat<\/em><\/a>, 2014-04-01<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New interests and different locations are provided by an iPad app that gathers pages relevant to my interests, and lets me indulge particular subjects, like \u201cAncient History.\u201d This gives me the impression I am learning something, and perhaps I am, but when you finish an article about Xobar the Cruel who ruled during the Middle [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1526,7,57,41],"tags":[288,588],"class_list":["post-25137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-greece","category-history","category-humour","category-quotations","tag-archaeology","tag-egypt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6xr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25137"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25138,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25137\/revisions\/25138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}