As someone who loves scholarship and dreams of writing books one day – if this remains a viable passion, that is – I of course abhor book burnings, both of the literal and proverbial variety. And even today, in our ostensibly modern times, the unnecessary, wanton, or even ideologically driven prohibition and destruction of written materials is still par for the course.1 So imagine my surprise when I tried to escape these contemporary tragedies by expanding my knowledge about the ancient world and still encountered the eradication of writings. In this case, it was one king Nabû-Naṣir of Babylonia, what is today the south of the state of Iraq, who is said to have destroyed certain records, presumably clay tablets, which pertained to his predecessors.2 Though this event seems elusive, as there is only one source on the matter and versions thereof contradict one another! So today, let us delve into the puzzling book burnings, in a proverbial sense, of an ancient West-Asian monarch.
Translating Nonsense: Fakes, A.I., and Imaginary Cuneiform
The currently popular chatbots that are based on large language models and which are colloquially known as AI’s – you have heard of them, they go by monikers like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT – have had an enormous impact on popularizing science and scholarship.1 And not only because I have to prove I am not a robot every other time when trying to access scholarly journals!2 Today, I want to single out one aspect of this matter: the proliferation of AI-generated texts and images of texts that imitate ancient writing systems and languages, but are merely a simulacrum of the real thing. These texts and images thereof nevertheless circulate extensively on the worldwide web, often accompanied by a request for their translation or a clarification of their meaning. Because of their superficial authenticity it is difficult to know whether you are translating nonsense before extending at least some effort. And this can, I’d argue, be prevented by encouraging people to try and share only material with an actual provenance, before asking experts or hobbyists for their help.
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Ancient Rome and the European Renaissance
Even in the third decade of the twenty-first century, contemporary societies are still obsessed with ancient Rome. Ancient Romans figure in our entertainment products, political discourse, and – perhaps most importantly – internet memes.1 And to be fair, there are some fascinating characters and events that can be found in the Rome of old.2 It will therefore not surprise you that we today share our obsession with earlier epochs.3 This week I want to discuss with you how famous and long dead Romans like Julius Caesar and Cicero figured in European Renaissance thought. An exploration that is all the more interesting, because the existence of an actual Roman Empire – the Eastern one, that is – overlapped at least partly with this period wherein ancient Rome was so admired. So, let us veni, let us vidi, and let us vici in the style of the European Renaissance.4
Ancient Lexical Lists as Philosophy
A candidate for the earliest story in cuneiform and therefore the oldest recorded tale tout court, is a lexical list from ancient west-Asia called AD-GI4. The oldest copy that has come down to us is more than 5000 years old! Despite this text being a list, we can cautiously distinguish a place, a time, and several characters. Together these entries tell a story about the necessity of proper field cultivation and the difference between living in the built environment versus a more wild landscape.1 That our oldest story is written in this format, is a testament to the versatility of that genre of texts. Lexical lists could be used to categorize ideas and observations, to describe and understand the physical and metaphysical world, and to communicate difficult concepts and beliefs. It is therefore no surprise that some lexical lists can be considered contributions to world philosophy, despite the fact that they are in a different format than most better known ancient texts which reflect on the human condition, including those written by famous Greek philosophers from the Aegean, like Plato and Aristotle.2
The Beautiful Nostalgia of The Trapeze Swinger by Iron & Wine
Last week we talked about books that can change lives and minds, but songs are – as most of you have undoubtedly experienced at some point in your own existence – perfectly capable of being as transformative.1 And I want to discuss one such song with you today, The Trapeze Swinger. This song was written by American singer-songwriter Sam Beam and recorded through his project Iron & Wine. It first appeared in the soundtrack of a fairly obscure movie, the romantic drama In Good Company from 2004, and subsequently as the (kind of) title track on a compilation of Iron & Wine rarities.2 Despite this complicated publication history and relative unavailability, the song not only became a fan favorite but it has resonated with people all over the world. Today, let us attempt to find out why that is.
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The Heartwarming Meta-Novel by David Mitchell
Perhaps it is too grand to state that books can change lives, but they can certainly change minds!1David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas has been one such book for me.2 It was an antidote for my intermittent anguish that it is futile for one person without institutional influence to advocate for human dignity and human rights in a way that no text book or scholarly article had been able to. In part because the novel acknowledges and engages with those possible setbacks, such as the relative powerlessness most of us experience, but shows us how to carry on anyway. Our efforts for a better world are only futile until they aren’t, so to say. That optimistic humanism is a theme that can be found throughout Mitchell’s oeuvre. And this is not surprising, as all his books are connected. It is those books and their connections, the so-called meta-novel, that I want to discuss with you today. And be assured, there will be a reading order as well as a numbered ranking – this is the worldwide web, after all!
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The Enchanted World View of the Hittites
People are people, whether they were born in Bronze Anatolia or just a few decades ago in a modern hospital – but their world views can still differ in fascinating ways. And when studying ancient world views, we may see our everyday existence in quite a different light, as well as bring some of the enchantment back that the contemporary world sometimes seems to have lost.1 Today I therefore want to talk with you about the decidedly enchanted world view that we find in our Hittite texts from ancient Anatolia. Specifically I want to discuss the place where these people of the deep past envisioned the most supernatural phenomena, beings, and energy to be found, the wilderness.
Searching for Forests in Sumerian
Everyone who is slightly interested in a relatively broad field has a specialization, even if it is only accidental. Because with the wealth of sources and scholarship that is fairly accessibly available to many, but far from enough, aficionados today, even an expert would struggle to study and read everything that is relevant to their personal quest for knowledge – barring them being exceptional and lucky enough to make their money through their preferred kind of research. And as the years have gone by, I have found that I almost absentmindedly stumbled into my own niche: the environmental humanities and therein the role of forests in ancient stories. But to find a specific natural phenomenon in those tales of the deep past that have come down to us is by no means easy.1 Primarily because ancient languages can hardly ever be translated without caveats. And to illustrate these often inevitable difficulties when trying to scour our sources for the precise subject that we are interested in, I want to introduce you today to the conundrum of searching for forests in the tales that were written in the ancient Sumerian language.
A Black Hole in Our Knowledge of Antiquity
Two weeks ago we talked about ʾIlîmilku, a linguistic innovator from the ancient Levantine city of Ugarit. And afterwards, a curious reader send me a question which I will paraphrase here: if there was only this one writer who used certain loanwords from other languages in his work, how could his readers understand them? One explanation is immediately obvious, they could deduct their meaning from the context – though this will not always have been possible. It is furthermore important to keep in mind that we only have a vanishingly small percentage of all the texts that were written in ancient West-Asia at our disposal. So maybe such loanwords only appear rare to us today because of our relative lack of sources. The last solution to our conundrum is also the most frightening to any aficionado of bygone societies: the loanwords in question could have been very common in everyday conversation. This brings us to a black hole in our understanding of the deep past in general and antiquity in particular: that what was spoken back then but did not reach us in written form is often lost to history. And it is that black hole which I want to discuss with you today.
The Dark Academia of ‘Katabasis’ by R.F. Kuang
Many phenomena we appreciate and depend on today were developed over a very long time period and if they would be invented in our current era, we would probably go very differently about it. And this may even include the current institutes of higher learning. The work conducted here has for literal centuries bettered the human condition, but there are still enhancements implemented worldwide and even more of those are proposed regularly.1 It is inspiring how the ideals of science and scholarship still motivate so many people to further polish the practice of academic research and knowledge transfer!2 And this makes me appreciate the dark academia novel Katabasis – written by Rebecca Kuang, who goes by the pen name R.F. Kuang – not only for its story but also for addressing, albeit in a tragicomical manner, some of the blind spots that academic institutions have overcome and even a few that are arguably not yet satisfactorily addressed.3 So, let me share my enthusiasm for this book with you, as well as for the fascinating esthetic of Dark Academia!
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