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
Category Archives: Antiquity
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.
Continue reading Forgotten Gods #3: Telipinu’s Disappearing Act
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.
Continue reading The Fascinating R-Stem in the Akkadian Language
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.
Forgotten Gods #2: Where Did Marduk Go?
You know what is a sobering fact which keeps me with both my feet firmly on the ground? That there was once a time – unbelievable but true – in which people did not venerate the great and ancient Mesopotamian god Marduk. And you know what’s even more indicative of the mere relative importance of everything? The fact that at one point people stopped venerating Marduk! Today we are going to look at the rise and fall of this imposing Mesopotamian god, of whom no-one in the second millennium BCE would have believed that their prominence could ever diminish.1 But nothing lasts forever and, as one age follows another, even the gods may become a mere historical footnote.Welcome to the second part of my always uplifting series on forgotten gods!
How One Word Enriched Our Understanding of the Gilgamesh Epic
Much of our current knowledge is merely provisional. Specifically in the humanities, we can always encounter new evidence, construct unique theoretical frameworks that support novel interpretations, or make use of the progress in other scientific disciplines.1 And such fresh insights in the humanities can subsequently help us to find even more new evidence, to construct further unique theoretical frameworks, and to aid other scientific disciplines in turn.2 These developments do not always entail that scholars had been wrong before, though – quite the contrary! Our understanding may also be merely expanded or enriched. And this can happen for the most pedestrian of reasons. Even one word can suffice! So today we will discuss how one newly discovered word of the Epic of Gilgamesh ushered in a better understanding of this famous tale from ancient West-Asia.
Continue reading How One Word Enriched Our Understanding of the Gilgamesh Epic
Forgotten Gods #1: Did NinSimug Exist?
The bulk of my readers, I assume, have made their peace with eventually being forgotten after their death. Because most of us will seldom be remembered after all that knew us have perished in turn. But one would expect that this could not be the fate of gods! After all, they have regularly amassed lots and lots of followers and their worship was often institutionalized. But even gods tend to be forgotten, be it after a shorter or a longer while. And nowadays many of them only figure in later reconstructions of past religions.1 In this new series, I want to introduce a few of these forgotten gods and through them illustrate some interesting aspects of ancient religious history, practices, and beliefs. This week, we survey the life and times of a deity from ancient west-Asia: NinSimug.
Dragon Myths and Dinosaur Bones
Dragons and dinosaurs. Not only does a substantial amount of children make one of these their entire personality for a while, but many adults are still highly interested in anything related to these respectively magical and prehistoric organisms.1 It is therefore only natural that both obsessions are regularly combined. And this has, amongst other things, led to the question we try to answer in this week’s blog: was it encounters with dinosaur bones that formed the basis for myths about dragons?
Searching for Forests in Ugaritic
Translation is seldom a straightforward exercise.1 One may be reminded of all those hypothetical but nonetheless disappointed British tourists who happily tried to visit a football match in the United States of America and left very confused. And such contemporary matters, like when the sport that the British call ‘football’ is known as ‘soccer’ in certain other parts of the world, are complicated enough.2 Imagine if a chasm of more than three millennia separates us from the language we aim to understand! And it is bridging such a chasm that we are attempting in today’s blog. As I shall show you the difficulty with understanding the lexicon of the ancient Levantine language that is today known as Ugaritic.