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.
Ecomusicology and Serenading Different Kinds of Nature
A while back we talked about the video game Tiny Glades and how the artifice of the landscapes you could create there showed how ‘nature’ is not a faraway sequestered space free of any and all human interference. On the contrary, in our Anthropocene age every environment, every biome, and even every imaginable place on earth is directly or indirectly, largely or in part, shaped by human influence.1 And this makes the topic I selected for this week’s blog, discussing some songs about escaping to nature, also theoretically interesting.2 Because if nature is not an unequivocally uniform concept, can it even be a shared refuge where all those artists envision themselves going? And it does indeed turn out, that very distinct kinds of nature are serenaded in these songs. Moreover, there is a field we can turn to, if we want to explain these differences: ecomusicology. So let us today survey that field and those songs in order to find out what an escape to nature would actually mean in a world where forests are as much an environment shaped by humankind as your average suburb.
Continue reading Ecomusicology and Serenading Different Kinds of Nature
Reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Is Still Rewarding
A while ago, I told some people about the fascinating experience that reading Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics entailed for me. A few queries about the Ethics followed. Not because I am an expert on this book or anything, but because I read more of it – and about it! – than the others present. And I can very much not help myself, sharing my enthusiasm for anything slightly related to the humanities… During that conversation I got an interesting question that fit the ethos of the Nicomachean Ethics: Why? Why read a philosophical treatise from more than two millennia ago? Philosophy has moved on since then, after all. Nobody has the spare time – and neither do their friends – to live the good life as proposed by Aristotle in the company he envisioned. The author of the Nichomachean Ethics was also famously misogynist and harbored many other views that do not fit our modern societies, with their human rights and the like. His stance on slavery was at best ambiguous and at worst tacit resignation, for crying out loud!1 So let us today discuss that monosyllabic question – why? Because I wish for others that very same experience that I had with the Nichomachean Ethics. But there are also more practical reasons to dust off this tome.
Continue reading Reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Is Still Rewarding
Where Was Ancient Mesopotamia? The Case for Microecologies
That most people do not spend every waking hour contemplating the ultimate origins and regularly shifting meaning of everyday words – especially those of us who are not writing blogs for other’s infotainment – does not mean that this isn’t a very rewarding activity.1 Especially when it comes to area designations which are so ingrained that we hardly think about them, like the ancient Mediterranean or ancient Mesopotamia. Because it can be interesting to work out under which circumstances such large regions during such long eras can fruitfully be denoted with a single label and when this would obscure important subdivisions or local developments. For instance. if one studies people’s relationship to their immediate environment – be it ideologically, economically, or in any other conceivable way – it may be rewarding to break up familiar areas into what is called microecologies.2 And it is this useful methodological tool that I want to discuss with you today. Through this discussion we will also discover the ultimate origins of the label ‘Mesopotamia’ and encounter some of the conspicuous environmental differences within this region in ancient times.
Continue reading Where Was Ancient Mesopotamia? The Case for Microecologies
Translation as Obfuscation: Is ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone de Beauvoir?
None of us can read all possible languages. For many of the important books that shaped our lives, from literary works that broadened our minds to philosophy treatises which opened new ways of thinking to us, we had thus to rely on translations. Which in turn meant trusting translators and the choices they made. And though there are many possible and valid ways to translate the written word from one language into another – on a spectrum that runs from ephemeral attempts to craft an equivalent text to complete re-imaginings – sometimes there are obvious mistakes.1 And none of these mistakes are perhaps as remarkable, or as instructive on the noble craft of translation itself, as those that can be found in the two attempts to translate Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe in English, both called The Second Sex.2
Continue reading Translation as Obfuscation: Is ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone de Beauvoir?
The Themes of My Favorite Video Games of 2024
After we discussed my twenty favorite albums of the previous calendar year last week, today I want to introduce you to three games that came out in 2024 and which may be of interest to the readers of this blog. Because the themes present in these products of digital entertainment harken back to subjects that we discussed on Bildungblocks in the past and provide, I hope, a new perspective on them. These are, in my opinion, also the best games of last year. As such, the following discussion doubles as a list with my favorite video games of 2024.
Continue reading The Themes of My Favorite Video Games of 2024
My Favorite Albums of 2024
2024, what a year! It was, like, a whole 12 months… In that time span some artists released records and others didn’t. And the former are lucky, because they are eligible to be on the list which relays my favorite albums of the previous calendar year! Remember how I struggled last year to confine this list to ten entries and had to settle for fifteen? Well, this year that did not happen, thankfully. This year I ended up with twenty albums. But before I reveal the list, I would be amiss to not first dedicate a few words on its – naturally painstaking – compilation and on some of the throughlines that can be said to characterize last year’s music. Because, as you might have guessed, this list is not (merely) meant to display my ridiculously refined tastes but to provide you all with some of the excellent music produced in 2024 that you might have missed and which can hopefully help with a good start of the new year.
Scholarship as an Art Form
Scholarship, from the hard sciences to the insightful humanities, has been characterized in many different ways since we started to think about this important human activity as an object of study in its own right.1 To name two acclaimed examples: in the early twentieth century BCE, Max Weber denoted science as a vocation, and a few decades afterwards, Thomas Kuhn revolutionized our theoretical notions about the trajectory of the scientific endeavor with his idea of progress in this regard as the shift from and towards different paradigms instead of incremental steps toward a delineated goal that hardly changes.2 All such grand theories about the pursuit of knowledge in a systematic way through communities of dedicated scholars and scientists have their defenders and detractors, and – as with most bold ideas – we can point to many necessary nuances.3 And this is perhaps what makes the works of theorists like Weber and Kuhn so well-known, that we can endlessly debate them. But today, I want to discuss one adjacent idea which is less famous, that of scholarship as an aesthetic or even an art form.
The Caring Queen: Puduḫepa of Hatti
A few weeks ago we discussed how history regularly does not give equal attention to all those who lived in the ancient past. In part, this is because of the limitations of our sources. Not only were the persons who could write back then often part of merely certain societal groups, but it also matters for whom and about whom they could chose to write within the constraints of their profession and world view. In addition there are the vicissitudes of fortune when it comes to which texts were accidently preserved and subsequently discovered, as well as to which texts kept getting copied and circulated throughout the ages.1 Due to such factors it is difficult to ascertain the lived experience of most women in many eras and areas, for example.2 Especially their inner world has often not survived through the written word. Though scholars did make progress in this regard for several different time periods and societies, including the monumental Women of Babylon by the Assyriologist Zainab Bahrani.3 And there is one prominent woman from ancient Anatolia who we may come to know reasonably well. A queen whose caring attitude shines through both the public and private documents pertaining to her: Puduḫepa of Hatti.