S.L. Harris
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slharris.bsky.social
S.L. Harris
@slharris.bsky.social
700 followers 1K following 360 posts
Writer, educator, sometime archaeologist | husband & dad | roots and beginnings | fiction website: ifchanceyoucallit.wordpress.com
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slharris.bsky.social
6. Robinson Crusoe’s Island, from the delightful literarymaps.com.
#MapMonday
A map of Robinson Crusoe’s island
September 9, 2025 at 1:10 AM
slharris.bsky.social
“Not now, dog! Can’t you see that @thomasha.bsky.social’s Uncertain Sons has arrived?”
A good dog tries to distract from the newly arrived short story collection, Uncertain Sons by Thomas Ha.
August 27, 2025 at 2:07 AM
slharris.bsky.social
5. Map of Babel, from the R.F. Kuang novel. #MapMonday
A framed map of Babel from the R.F. Kuang novel.
August 25, 2025 at 2:21 PM
slharris.bsky.social
4. Map of Beleriand and the Lands to the North. J.R.R. Tolkien, from the Silmarillion illustrated deluxe edition.
Map of Beleriand and the Lands to the North
August 18, 2025 at 2:29 PM
slharris.bsky.social
Joos van Craesbeeck really capturing the feel of being connected to the Internet these days.
"The Temptation of St. Anthony" by Joos van Craesbeeck. A small St. Anthony resists the temptations of multiple phantasmagoric demons, while an enormous screaming head with figures slicing their way out of its brow dominates the left side of the canvas.
August 15, 2025 at 2:30 PM
slharris.bsky.social
"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 A woman encounters the ghost of the author of a dull, out-of-date book and promises to be its reader.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."
...and here was a woman walking past his very grave, and saying she knew nothing about him. "How do [you] know I said that?" asked Mrs. Chindle. And I must say it was very bold of her, speaking up like that to a ghost, all alone with the thing at midnight; but I trust every word that she said to me. And the ghost had said, "How do I know? How do the dead know? Do you think that those that work for posterity, who give all their lives to the service of posterity, don't know what posterity says of us, and tonight in particular?" But I told you I set no store by one night more than another. That's superstition. And then Mrs. Chindle was frightened. I wonder she wasn't before. But a vehemence seems to have poured from the ghost, which frightened her then, and she had said to it, "I'll do what I can, sit." And the ghost seems to have known that she really meant it, probably reading her sincerity more clearly than words, and had vanished. And Mrs. Chindle had gone to our little library, where of course we had no book by any Poncet or Pincing; but she got in touch with reference books and one day she found his name and somehow or other she hunted out this old book, which she got for a few..." ...pence, and had been reading ever since, up to the time when I entered her house and heard her story. "What happened? Why, I tried to persuade her to stop wasting her time on such unprofitable reading. "Unprofitable?" she said to me. "Yes," I said. "It's all out of date, every line of it." "Does nobody else ever read it, Sir?" she asked me. And I thought I was getting her round to my way of thinking. But not a bit of it. To my astonishment she said, "Then he's only got me, Sir." And she went on reading that book for a few more years. And then one night she died, just as the clock struck midnight, or so we gathered from a little cry that a neighbour heard from her bedroom on the last note of the hour; and the doctor said that it would have been about then. And there was one of those happy expressions on her face, such as you see on the faces of people when someone has come to thank them."
August 14, 2025 at 5:26 PM
slharris.bsky.social
Show me your getaway vehicle.
The racing snail from the Neverending Story
August 13, 2025 at 11:53 PM
slharris.bsky.social
3. Map of Richard Adams's "Watership Down" and surrounding area. From Watership Down Illustrated (Etsy):
www.etsy.com/uk/listing/9...
A map of Watership Down and surrounding areas.
August 11, 2025 at 2:44 PM
slharris.bsky.social
Mark Knopfler in the band Dire Straits
August 9, 2025 at 4:25 PM
slharris.bsky.social
2. Map of Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon, by Doug Kovacs, from the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar boxed set.
The Land of Nehwon, map by Doug Kovacs for Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar.
July 28, 2025 at 2:34 PM
slharris.bsky.social
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 (?)
A map entitled "Where Timothy and His Family Go Home-Hunting on Mars in "The Million Year Picnic," with sites labeled from the Ray Bradbury story, including "Rocket Ship Blown Up Here," "Ruined Cities," "Oxygen Supplying Vegetation," "Earthmen's Science Colony," and "Martians Seen Here."
July 14, 2025 at 1:34 PM
slharris.bsky.social
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.
Sepia photos of a naked human figure with an elongated head, "coffee-bean" eyes, and raised circles on shoulders and chest. The figure holds a stick or scepter. From Safar, Mustafa, & Lloyd 1981.
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
slharris.bsky.social
Other cool ceramic finds from Eridu include incense burners, boat models, bowls with snakes in relief, and these cute little ceramic serpents.
Alt: An incense burner from Eridu. Image: Safar, Mustafa, and Lloyd 1981 Cute little ceramic snakes from Eridu. Image: Safar and Lloyd 1981
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
slharris.bsky.social
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.
A tortoise-shell shaped jar in black slip with an elongated spout. Image: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FCRP (Glasg) CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
slharris.bsky.social
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.
Late Ubaid; painted bowl, decorated with geometric designs in dark paint; c. 5200 – c. 4200 BC; Tell el-Muqayyar; British Museum. Wikimedia Commons.
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
slharris.bsky.social
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.
A composite black and white photo of the temple sequence at Eridu, from a very early square building through a large-scale temple. Image: Safar, Mustafa, and Lloyd, 1981 Schematic diagram showing superimposed temple remains of the prehistoric period, from a small square shrine through an Ur III ziggurat. Image: Safar, Mustafa, and Lloyd, 1981
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
slharris.bsky.social
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.
A seal impression showing the god Enki in a horned hat with water and fishes emanation from his shoulders and a bird alighting on his hand. Enki (detail of the Adda seal, British Museum 89115); wikimedia commons
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
slharris.bsky.social
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.
A Marsh Arab village in southern Iraq, where small boats move on a network of marshy canals between reed huts and other structures (1974). Image: Nik Wheeler / Corbis
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
slharris.bsky.social
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
🏺🧵
A team of archaeologists works on a mounded archaeological site, the city of Eridu in southern Iraq. Mud bricks are visible in the excavation. Image: Alla Al-Marjani/Reuters/GTRES
July 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
slharris.bsky.social
New bit of Tolkien gnosticism - "'ēl běrît," the title Yahweh assumes from El, is clearly equivalent to "Elbereth."
"In the early history of Israel, when the cult of Shechem became Yahwistic, it inherited and continued the El traditions of that site. Hence Yahweh received the title 'ēl běrît, the old title of El." From Mark S. Smith, "The Early History of God":
May 27, 2025 at 6:03 PM
slharris.bsky.social
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
Eretz Israel Museum display of a Tel Rehov beehive, a baked clay cylindrical pipe, alongside a honeycomb and other materials. A pen drawing by Amihai Mazar of the Iron Age apiary at Tel Rehov. Long rows of clay cylinders stand stacked three high, and workers harvest honey and wax from them.
May 20, 2025 at 12:49 PM
slharris.bsky.social
Take the fictional characters quiz and post the first four you know:

openpsychometrics.org/tests/charac...

Yeah, seems about right.
Konstantin “Kostya” Levin, Anna Karenina Willow Rosenberg, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Frodo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings Chidi Anagonye, The Good Place
May 18, 2025 at 10:44 AM
slharris.bsky.social
According to the text sensu stricto, Smaug came to Erebor for the fun toys.
An excerpt from The Hobbit: "...the most marvellous and magical toys, the like of which is not to be found in the world now-a-days. So my grandfather's halls became full of armour and jewels and carvings and cups, and the toy market of Dale was the wonder of the North. Undoubtedly that was what brought the dragon. Dragons steal gold and jewels, you know, from men and elves and dwarves, wherever they can find them."
May 13, 2025 at 9:22 AM
slharris.bsky.social
Zuck: the average American has three friends
Three witches of Terry Pratchett's Discworld fly on brooms toward the viewer: Nanny Ogg, Granny Weatherwax, and Magrat Garlick.
May 1, 2025 at 5:01 PM
slharris.bsky.social
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