Weekly Roundup of History, Archaeology and Writing Wisdom April 9-15

To all my Arizona readers: I’m speaking from11 to 12 Saturday April 16 at the Tempe Book Festival at the library on Rural Road. The Festival runs from 10-3 and will have a variety of authors speaking and signing. Should be fun. The inaugural year, so come on out and get it started right! Find out the details by clicking here.

Posts I enjoyed around the web this week:

Take 1 particularly rich collection of ostracon writing samples from a desert fortress in ancient kingdom of Judah, apply some historical and mathematical analysis and you get a much higher estimation of literacy rates in 600 BCE than previously thought. I find the requests to send wine and other necessities a great window into daily life. And the notion that a high number of low-level soldiers could read and write also adds a really interesting insight. As one of the scholars at Tel Aviv University noted, “There is something psychological beyond the statistics.” For Biblical scholars, this high literacy rate impacts when the Bible as a written text might have come into being—but that one they’ll be debating for a long time to come. Meanwhile, I’m loving the intimacy of detail that this gives me of this place and time. Click here for the New York Times “New Evidence on When Bible was written: ancient shopping lists”

We like to give the Greeks a lot of credit—inventing Western Civilization and whatnot. But sometimes we need to look further east for some of the things we attribute to the Greeks, the Pythagorean theory being one of those things. 1300 years before Pythagoras was born, a student in Babylonia used a circular tablet of clay to do his geometry exercise calculating the length of the hypotenuse. This tablet is now widely published in math textbooks—not new news—but Yale’s digital imaging of the tablet is news. I loved the video clip in this story showing the techniques they used to highlight the subtle indentations etc of the fragile original so it can be studied and used by a wide audience. And I love imagining this young student laboring over his math homework back in 1800 BCE. Click here for Yale’s “A 3800 year journey from Classroom to Classroom”

And the reason I only have a couple intriguing links this week (and I owe one of them to my husband’s aunt–thanks!) is that I went on a brief family visit to DC. I enjoyed good food (lots), contemporary art (in abundance), and history (George’s house). Here are a few photos of my husband and me at Mt. Vernon. True to form, most of my photos were of the sheep and their lean to, which all seemed quite usable to me in a Bronze Age context. Do I have a clear photo of the lovely front of George’s carefully designed home? Of course not. I can’t put Mt. Vernon in a Hittite book, so I totally forgot to get one of those!