Everyone has to start somewhere, I'm sure it'll go well

What does anyone have against Babylonian lapidary?

Excellent, what's the book?

How long does it take to produce that?

It's so easy for "old" to slide towards meaning not worth caring about, or hopelessly out of reach, when we just need to redirect it towards engaging with a fundamental fascination for the past that a lot of people do indeed have underlying (6/6)

The "unimaginably old" perception is basically the motivation for the Ea-nāṣir meme, which is only really funny because of surprise that ancient people thought the same way we do, which shouldn't fundamentally be surprising (but if it gets more people interested in the field, I'm all for it) (5/n)

They had the first recorded writing! They fought in these sorts of close formations thousands of years before the Macedonian phalanx came along! (4/n)

B) is of course true but has the side-effect of people thinking old -> esoteric and irrelevant rather than old -> "wow, these were sophisticated societies that weren't fundamentally different from our own, and we have the sources to learn about them thousands of years later!" (3/n)

A) is great, but it takes active effort to convince people that it isn't some arcane ability you need a special talent for - learning signs is *time-consuming* but I always try to push how if you want to attain a language-based goal, you just need to be prepared to do whatever work is needed (2/n)

Is there a non-image version of the link? Just can't tell what some of the letters are supposed to be, thanks

Hope the final steps in securing that go as smoothly as possible!

I’ve often had to explain I’m not saying “Acadian”

19*4=76 on the anthem clue. These seem fun, do keep posting them!

A quip from the great Matthew Stolper: “Those scribes had pretty short life spans, so it must not take too long to get good at Akkadian. Reading a newspaper in English is 100 times more complex than reading a cuneiform tablet.”

What’s the Achaemenid content like, out of interest? Never actually played AoE

This is beside the point (no-one should emulate Sparta), but it's ironic how in saying this he goes totally against the "warrior" culture he so admires - the Spartans notably *don't* cut their hair after the "Battle of the Champions", where they lose 299 out of 300 of their men (Hdt. 1.82)

Congratulations - I think it ought to be clear the tripos system is not at all an accurate way to measure one’s suitability to do this

Read more: www.christendom.edu/wp-content/u... (4/4)