S.L. Harris
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slharris.bsky.social
S.L. Harris
@slharris.bsky.social
Writer, educator, sometime archaeologist | husband & dad | roots and beginnings | fiction website: ifchanceyoucallit.wordpress.com
6. Robinson Crusoe’s Island, from the delightful literarymaps.com.
#MapMonday
September 9, 2025 at 1:10 AM
“Not now, dog! Can’t you see that @thomasha.bsky.social’s Uncertain Sons has arrived?”
August 27, 2025 at 2:07 AM
5. Map of Babel, from the R.F. Kuang novel. #MapMonday
August 25, 2025 at 2:21 PM
4. Map of Beleriand and the Lands to the North. J.R.R. Tolkien, from the Silmarillion illustrated deluxe edition.
August 18, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Joos van Craesbeeck really capturing the feel of being connected to the Internet these days.
August 15, 2025 at 2:30 PM
"At Midnight" is a Lord Dunsany story that I feel deeply. A woman encounters the ghost of the author of a dull, out-of-date book and promises to be its reader. The narrator tries to convince her to give it up. No one reads the old thing anymore.
She responds: "Then he's only got me, Sir."
August 14, 2025 at 5:26 PM
Show me your getaway vehicle.
August 13, 2025 at 11:53 PM
3. Map of Richard Adams's "Watership Down" and surrounding area. From Watership Down Illustrated (Etsy):
www.etsy.com/uk/listing/9...
August 11, 2025 at 2:44 PM
August 9, 2025 at 4:25 PM
2. Map of Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon, by Doug Kovacs, from the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar boxed set.
July 28, 2025 at 2:34 PM
Sharing a map a week from the walls of my map room. Mostly fiction, folklore, games, and film.
#MapMonday

1. "Where Timothy and his Family go Home-Hunting on Mars in [Ray Bradbury's] "The Million Year Picnic." Back cover of the Dell MapBack book "Invasion from Mars". Art by Ruth O'Neal Belew (?)
July 14, 2025 at 1:34 PM
Speaking of snakes, famous Ubaid "ophidian" figurines with their elongated heads and coffee-bean eyes have been catnip to theorists of aliens and serpent people, but there's no basis for such stuff. What they probably show is cranial deformation and perhaps ritual scarification.
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Other cool ceramic finds from Eridu include incense burners, boat models, bowls with snakes in relief, and these cute little ceramic serpents.
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
This "lenticular" or "tortoise-shaped" jar has been found in Iran and northern Iraq as well, and, at Eridu at least, probably had some ritual application. This one was filled with fish bones.
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Eridu was key to establishing the chronology of the Ubaid period (ca. 6000-4000 BCE), especially through the work of Joan Oates. Ubaid ceramics are characterized by black or brown geometric painted decoration on buff or green ceramic paste; changes over time give us the trad'l Ubaid periodization.
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Safar & Lloyd excavated a series of temples rebuilt in the same location over centuries. This fabulous composite plan and photo show its transformation from a single-room shrine through a niched-and-buttressed tripartite building and eventually into a large ziggurat.
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
No coincidence that Eridu was the sacred center of the god Enki, a tutelary, trickster god and master of the great subterranean fresh waters, the Abzu. It was also the home of the sage Adapa, a fisherman who brushed up against immortality. Water, water everywhere.
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Today Eridu is a set of mounds in the dry alluvial plains southwest of ancient Ur, but in the Ubaid (ca. 6000-4000 BCE) and Uruk (ca. 4000-3100 BCE) periods, the mounds would have been turtleback islands in the midst of rich marshland.
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Ancient Eridu (Tell Abu Shahrein in Southern Iraq) is memorialized in Sumerian literature and historiography as the first city, the place to which the scepter of kingship first descended. It was inhabited since at least 5500 BCE.
#archaeosky
#archaeology
#Mesopotamia
🏺🧵
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
New bit of Tolkien gnosticism - "'ēl běrît," the title Yahweh assumes from El, is clearly equivalent to "Elbereth."
May 27, 2025 at 6:03 PM
For #WorldBeeDay, the Iron Age (ca. 1000 BCE) apiary at Tel Rehov. The hives were pipe-like clay cylinders, and honey and wax were harvested at large scale.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Rehov
May 20, 2025 at 12:49 PM
Take the fictional characters quiz and post the first four you know:

openpsychometrics.org/tests/charac...

Yeah, seems about right.
May 18, 2025 at 10:44 AM
According to the text sensu stricto, Smaug came to Erebor for the fun toys.
May 13, 2025 at 9:22 AM
Zuck: the average American has three friends
May 1, 2025 at 5:01 PM
Movie you’ve watched more than six times using gifs.

(“Hard mode” no Star Wars, Star Trek, or LOTR)
April 26, 2025 at 7:41 AM