Christopher W. Jones

E.g. Trump saying he doesn't endorse Project 2025, or that the judges he appointed to the Supreme Court wouldn't overturn Roe.

I think what you're bumping into here is a double shell game that both parties play with their platforms, where they stake out a position that both their supporters and opponents believe to be a lie, the former hopes they are lying and the latter fears it.

We haven't internalized that writing history is a cultural practice. A contingent practice that isn't guaranteed to continue.

If we don't figure out a way to turn this ship around, we're going to end up like those Babylonian scribes, writing the final cuneiform tablets in the 1st century AD.

I don't think my field has really reckoned with how the essential transience of the Internet has severed many people's lived experience of having a connection to the past.

At the societal level, digital culture takes on some aspects of oral culture.

Of course, most novi homines I can think of came from families which hadvheld Roman citizenship for generations - so the relationship between mass Italian enfranchisement and new men in the Senate isn't clear to me.

I'm surprised no one has done this already. But also seems obvious that the mass enfranchisement of Italians in the early 1st c would lead to more novi homines?

Another good example is in this thread on Publius Ventidius Bassus! (author of the thread is a good person to follow) bsky.app/profile/bret...

A Unique Assemblage of Cremation Burial from Ḥorvat Tevet and Assyrian Imperial Rule in the Jezreel Valley The excavation at Ḥorvat Tevet revealed a unique cremation burial assemblage, dating to the Iron IIC. This diverse assemblage, richer than comparable burials throughout the Levant, includes unparal...

Here's a link to the full publication: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Archaeologists stunned by lavish Assyrian-period tomb in northern Israel Hundreds of Luxury Artifacts Accompanied the 2,700-year-old Burial. Could These Be the Remains of an Assyrian Governor Who Ruled Over the Vanquished Kingdom of Israel?

Fascinating find from the Jezreel Valley! A tomb containing an impressive assortment of wealthy grave goods. Authors suggest it could have been an Assyrian governor of Megiddo province, but I'm not aware of any Neo-Assyrian cremation burials? Who else could it be? www.haaretz.com/archaeology/...

Is anyone else getting tons of clearly AI-written emails asking to read your work?

All appear to be impersonating real scholars while placing them in departments they don't teach in or nonexistent departments at real schools.

I've been having these conversations with ambitious sophomores lately, when there's still time to change course.

Revealed preferences are key to interpreting any survey like this.

Americans' Ideal Family Size Remains Above Two Children Even as the U.S. birth rate has fallen to a new low of 1.6 births per woman, Americans still say the ideal family includes an average of 2.7 children.

Link: news.gallup.com/poll/694640/...

Interesting historical data here: Pretty much the only time that desired and actual fertility matched in the US since 1935 was during the baby boom from 1945-1965.

Before and after, women in the aggregate consistently report wanting 0.4 to 1 more child than they end up having.

Rome Q:

The Late Republic is often described as a hardened oligarchy, but it seems to me that the upper ranks of Roman society were actually more open than in the middle Republic, and this contributed to political instability.

Same for the Crisis of the Third Century.

Thoughts?

Nay, I stand corrected: proclaiming that it was a moral imperative to for every PhD program to do this.

This is what so many people in the field have spent the past decade saying should be done.

Another great thing about going low-tech in the classroom is that a few weeks ago we had a campus-wide power outage just before our midterm.

We proceeded with blue books, pens, and natural light just as intended.

Sooo would now be a bad time to email a Louvre department manager about publication permissions?

Today with Canvas down we sat as a class and contrasted Paul's athletic metaphors with Novatian's condemnation of Roman spectacles, exactly as we would have done anyways.

Contemporary military damage at Khorsabad: A case study for conflic... Introduction Khorsabad, in ancient times Dūr Šarrukin, is located in the northern part of the district of Mosul, in the sub-district of Bashiqa which is 20 km north of the city of Mosul (administra...

An interesting paper has been published documenting the damage to the ancient Assyrian site of Khorsabad from military entrenchments from the 2003 Iraq invasion and from 2014-2016 during the war with ISIS: journals.openedition.org/syria/18291

When Ishtar approaches Sîn...

And if they're doing this for the only target struck so far that was clearly a narco (no one uses semi-submersibles for anything but drug smuggling in the Caribbean), we can be sure they're not just worried about an acquittal but preventing challenges to the legality of the strike program itself.

I remind my students that Egyptian pharaohs didn't have that power either, after the 4th dynasty.

I love to show them what 5th/12th dynasty pyramids looked like!

Assyrian court scholars of the Nabû-zuqup-kenu family had people murdered, carried out human sacrifices, and conducted medical experimentation on enslaved human beings. The dark side of cuneiform scholars.

Personally, based on artistic depictions I remain unconvinced that large polyremes had anything more than two decks.

The simple solution to this problem is that any of these configurations would have been considered a "5", no?

I don't know the background of your students, but one thing I've noticed is that people who speak English as second language often don't have a native speaker's intuition for how fake AI-text sounds.

This gap between ends and means had been a problem for the Reconstructionists since RJ Rushdoony.

As far as I can tell, their most detailed solution is:
1) Completely rule out any role for violence in establishing their ideal political order.
2) Slowly convince everyone to live the way they want.

Should have noted, I'm not taking this as indicative of nationwide opinion, but of the state of public opinion in the heart of Trump voter country.