Ebooks and audiobooks are a staple of many people’s current reading habits. Even though their precursors go back way further than you’d probably think, they really went mainstream in the last two decades.1 And is this any surprise? The convenience of having a plethora of books available wherever you go and often on devices you are bringing with you anyhow, is undeniable. As those of you who are subscribed to the Bildungblocks-newsletter might know, since last summer I am rapidly losing the rest of my already abysmal remaining level of sight. And this complicates researching these blogs, as you can imagine! As such, I have started using an e-reader since a considerate family member gifted me one a couple of weeks ago. Because with such a device I can enlarge the letters to my heart’s content and create a high contrast reading environment. And I am painfully aware that all too soon my reading activities will be mostly confined to audiobooks. These matters inspired the question we will look at today: how do ebooks and audiobooks fare as research tools in comparison to their printed counterparts, especially when we consider their accessibility?
The Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyph Netjer
There is one abiding interest everybody – from children which have just recently acquired theory of mind to the most practically minded adults with the most boring jobs imaginable – shares when it comes to antiquity and that is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.1 This writing system is, without any sarcasm, always a hit at party’s and other festive events. And today, as kind of an appetizer to at least temporarily satisfy this universal curiosity, I want to introduce one specific hieroglyph: a sign that the ancient Egyptians used to write about the supernatural and the divine. More specifically the hieroglyph that chiefly denoted their word for god – Netjer.2
Disaster Stories and Navigating Difficult Ecological Choices in Antiquity
What do you do at the end of the world as you know it? When the usual rules that until then governed life’s basic necessities – like how crops, livestock, and other foodstuffs should be tended – no longer seem to apply? This is a situation where the people of ancient societies found themselves in with alarming regularity. Not only were there weather fluctuations and adjacent setbacks to deal with, like famines, but they also had to content with climate changes over timescales that were not immediately apparent to those living through them.1 Such dire situations regularly imposed tough and far-reaching decisions, which can appear horrifyingly familiar – even from our distant vantage point in the twenty-first century.2 As such, studying what people back then did and did not do when confronted with ecological calamities, can in turn fuel our own considerations and imaginations.
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How Hefty Were Roman Books?
Here in the Netherlands it is the perfect weather to cozy up in a chair by the fire and lose yourself in a book – unless you are a big fan of cold, rain, and ill-timed gusts of wind, that is! And the more pages such a book encompasses, at least in my experience, the better it can help you to forget the outside world for a while. Which nicely ties in to a question that I got from one of the readers of the Bildungblocks-newsletter and which I want to discuss with you today: How hefty were Roman books?1
Forgotten Gods #3: Telipinu’s Disappearing Act
Today, the ancient Anatolian deity called Telipinu is, for most intents and purposes, a forgotten god. Though, there are admirable attempts to keep the tales that tell us about him and his divine colleagues alive for the modern day. Like the English renditions of a few Hittite poems for the fall 2025 issue of the literary magazine The Paris Review, translated by PhD-student Naomi Harris.1 One of these poems relates the disappearance of Telipinu, something the deity had a penchant for.2 What is interesting, however, is that much of the mythology concerning Telipinu emphasizes that he should not, under any circumstance, be forgotten – even if he was indeed lost and both heaven and earth had to be moved to find him again. Because, when Telipinu could not be found, ecological disaster was sure to follow. Today we are therefore going to talk about a god that emphatically should not be neglected by mortal creatures, from bees to human beings, but ultimately was.
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The Fascinating R-Stem in the Akkadian Language
Like every other cool person out there, I am of course fascinated by the minutiae of ancient languages. Especially the parts of these languages which still lay at least partly outside the grasp of our full comprehension can draw me into a scholarly book or article and leave me surprised that the sun is already gone when I finally look up – though living in the far north arguably makes this a bit less extraordinary… Today I want to share some of this enthusiasm with you by discussing a linguistic phenomenon that is still debated among contemporary scholars and of which some even say that it isn’t even real – the R-stem in the ancient Akkadian language.
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The Themes of My Favorite Video Games of 2025
Like the previous year, I want to follow up last week’s list with my favorite albums of 2025 by discussing the themes of some of the better video games that were published in those same twelve months. And as was the case then, I am a bit apprehensive about doing so. You can read more of my deliberations by clicking here, but to summarize: while encountering music is nearly unavoidable in one’s daily life, video games appear to many as a distant, unvisited country.1 And when people do play them, it is often a very specific kind.2 The games that I discuss today were therefore selected because they tell stories which, I think, appeal to every reader imaginable. What’s more, the games themselves are – if I can be candid for a moment – more or less an excuse to talk about certain subjects within the humanities that are a good fit for Bildungblocks but would otherwise not suffice to fill an entire blog by themselves.
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My Favorite Albums of 2025
The year 2025 has come and gone. For some it may have appeared like a breeze as they wonder where those 365 days actually went, while others struggled to get through the weeks and were happy to see the end of it. For those following the record industry, it was also a very long year. Luckily, this was not because of some kind of struggle, but because of the sheer quantity of quality output! As such and in order to hide my hesitation when it comes to making hard choices, I propose to instate a new tradition at Bildingblocks… To let the number of albums that I discuss at year’s end match the last two digits of the date. Totally coincidentally, this means that I can discuss twenty-five albums today, instead of last year’s twenty.
Three Hundred Spartans and One Metaphor
If there is one occurrence that many people remember from antiquity, it is that three hundred soldiers from the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta once stood against the much larger army of the Persian king Xerxes.1 This is partly the result of its many depictions in pop culture, including the well-known fantastical – and fairly problematic – retelling in the movie 300 from 2006.2 The second Greco-Persian war, which occurred in the beginning of the fifth century BCE and that saw the aforementioned heroics of the Spartans, was a time of military savvy, masterful intrigue, and uncountable tears. But today I want to focus on one specific aspect, a single word even. I am concerned here with a term that the ancient historian Herodotus uses to describe the thought process of the Spartan king Leonidas I when the latter send most of the other Greeks soldiers away – yes, there were other Greeks present! – and prepared his Spartans for their last stand. That word is τάξις (taxis).3 And Herodotus’ metaphorical use of what ultimately was just a mere technical term, can inform us about the martial ideologies of Greece in that time.
Excel in Ancient Mesopotamia
You know what is useful in any kind of research endeavor? In addition to the expected copious amounts of caffeine, a disregard for the fact that your life is finite, and the merciful existence of takeaway food services while working overtime, that is.1 Tables! And this got me thinking: when did tabular accounts appear in ancient Mesopotamia? Or in other words: was there a cuneiform alternative for programs like Excel and Calc, that are so ubiquitous today? As with many questions we try to answer here at Bildungblocks – and one of the primary reasons that these blogs are often published irregularly – this matter turned out to be way more complicated then you would expect at first. But one could argue, if only for my own sanity, that such complications make a topic merely more intriguing than it already is.