We are almost done with the construction around here. The bathtub has moved into the bathroom. The shower will get its glass surround and the sinks and backsplash go in next week. The mirrors are still to come after that, but otherwise our new bathroom is finished. I need to restock the bookshelves with all the books piled in a back bedroom. I guess most people don’t have bookshelves in the bathroom, but it looked like wasted space to me, so we built in shelves years ago.
Here are some posts from around the web that I enjoyed this week:
Dating events in the Bronze Age and earlier eras throughout the Near East and Mediterranean is an esoteric process. One of the key sources that makes precise dating possible is the collection of a wide range of tree ring dates (from furniture, etc). That combined with the other dating techniques (pottery, radiocarbon dating, etc) still left centuries long discrepancies. Now Sturt Manning from my alma mater Cornell (where tree ring dating of the ancient world got much of its start) has pulled together enough info that the discrepancies may be put to rest. Never know with such things, and I’m no expert so I can’t evaluate this, but it sounds like there will be reasonable agreement among scholars. I do notice how much of the evidence has come from various Anatolian sites where tree ring data can be combined with the rich written records, and since the Hittites corresponded and interacted with all the major kingdoms of the Mediterranean and Near East, there are references in those records to all sorts of key people. All this handy stuff can be combined to give more precise dating to reigns and wars, etc. So if you were ever wondering how we know that an Assyrian king or an Egyptian Pharaoh did this or that in a particular year, now you have a rough idea. Click here for “Solving the Mesopotamian Timeline Puzzle with Tree Rings and Radiocarbon Research”
The Scythians, nomadic peoples on the edges of the ancient Greek world, occasionally get mention by the Greeks and others, but I suspect that they are as vague a presence for most people as they are for me. Archaeology has an interesting article about the golden cups and other stunning finds from a burial and possible ritual center of the Scythians that has been excavated (not pictured here because I don’t have the rights to those photos…). I’m particularly interested because my current work in progress features the Kaskans, another ancient nomadic people (earlier), in the far north of what is today Turkey. Like the Scythians, there is little archaeologically to inform us of the Kaskans. So some comparative work is probably justified. I liked learning a bit more about Scythians, especially their obvious appreciation of mythical creatures like griffins, so often featured in ancient Near Eastern and Greek art. Click here for Archaeology “Rites of the Scythians”
“More than 3,400 years later, the Greek tales of the Trojan War continue to inspire artists and poets and assert their relevance for modern life.” Now that’s an opening sentence for a newspaper article I can cheer! Modern dance choreographer, Pascal Rioult, created “Women On The Edge…Unsung Heroines of the Trojan War,” “a triptych that examines the consequences of war on women and others on the periphery of the conflict.” Rioult’s take on the stories of Iphigenia, Helen and Cassandra is described this way: “There’s a darkness to these stories — tales of careless men failing women, silencing them, nullifying their concerns and making them collateral damage. There’s a quality about the women, Rioult said, that attracted him to their stories.” The performance was in North Carolina, so I didn’t see it, but if it comes near me, I will. The Greek myths have taken so many forms over the millennia. I thoroughly enjoyed a one-man stage version of the Iliad a while back, though that’s pretty close to the original format. Modern dance requires a greater degree of abstraction, I’d guess. What about you, can you see these myths in modern dance? Do you want to? Click here for Duke Today “Dancing to the continued relevance of the Trojan War”