Justin

'[Keeping] oxen alive year-round required a
substantial investment in feed and maintenance. That may not have been possible on a large scale until the Chalcolithic. For the same reason, beginning in the Chalcolithic, ownership of oxen probably began to define the differences haves and have-nots' [79

'the impacts of the secondary products revolution extended beyond livestock keeping... In particular, grain production received a major boost... Attached to a plow, a pair of oxen could increase the amount of land brought under cultivation about tenfold.' [79

'The association of sheep, goats, and cattle with wealth... took root in the wake of the secondary products revolution [when] communities in Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent [went] from production strategies geared primarily to meet subsistence needs to... production of commodities for exchange'[79

Nice pig vessel

'Pigs' absence from ritual contexts might have been due not so much to the development of negative attitudes towards pork as to the elevation of the status of mutton and beef... I argue this reflects a developing association between ruminants and wealth.' [78-9

Not everyone hates US intervention! Business leaders love it!

Feels genuinely unusual to get this extent of historical context in the news section

thinking (as i often do) about how the "technology" aspect of "information technology" obscures the "information" aspect, and how people who normally have a quite sophisticated understanding of the information dynamics in play completely lose the plot when they get a whiff of "technology"

This is great - a nice little Marxy dive into the role of Epstein

Matt Bolton is such a cunt

Viral marketing for One Battle After Another:

UK military equipment used by militia accused of genocide found in Sudan, UN told Exclusive: two dossiers of material seen by the security council raise questions over export of British arms to the UAE, which has been accused of supplying weapons to paramilitary RSF group

www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

'One explanation for the diminished presence of pork in Chalcolithic feasts is that pigs became tied up with emerging class identities. That is, people may have begun to associate pigs with lower social classes or with quotidian as opposed to ritual activities.' [78

'But feasting served another important role: to create a distinction between the upper classes and the hoi polloi. Large-scale celebrations intended only for the enter- tainment of aristocrats represented a radical new use of food beginning in the Chalcolithic.' [77

'The transition to complex societies required the breakdown of mechanisms that had limited social inequality... By casting themselves as providers for the people and as instruments of social cohesion, elites found in feasts a way to justify their existence and authority.' [77

4th millennium BC cylinder seal impressions containing scenes of wild boar hunting.

'Beginning in the 4th millennium, Mesopotamian kings commissioned images of themselves hunting to symbolize their masculinity, strength, and dominance over nature. While lions and bulls were the main animals displayed, wild boar were also portrayed.' [77

'Although hunting was no longer a major means of subsistence in most of the Near East, it became an activity symbolically important for the elite, not only as a form of recreation, but also as an allegory for their power.' [77

'The emergence of complex societies in the 5th and 4th millennia BC upended traditional egalitarian values, enforced new economic concepts such as (family-based) private property, and cast individuals into specific social roles. Food played an important part in this process.' [76

Pigs in the Chalcolithic: the Great Transformation

'in the fiercely egalitarian Late Neolithic societies, feasts and other rituals may well have served to suppress the ambitions of elites. Regular feasts may have been ritualized and enforced means by which villagers shared food and other resources.' [76

'Another reason people may have decided ta pen their pigs was to produce more pork for feasts, a goal to which intensive husbandry was well suited. In fact, there is zooarchaeologica evidence for pig feasts in the Late Neolithic.' [75

'People could herd sheep and goats farther away from their settlements, but cattle-herding and crop-growing took place in the fields surrounding... These are not ideal conditions for extensively managed pigs which can frighten cattle and ravage corn. Moving them into pens would [fix] the problem'[75

What a strange thing to write unless you agree that Israel is basically a nation of heavily armed white people hellbent on genocide

Dan Levene, 'Incantation Texts in Jewish Aramaic from Late Antiquity - A Corpus of Magic Bowls'

discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10...

Aramaic incantation texts from Nippur : Montgomery, James A. (James Alan), 1866-1949 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive 26

James Montgomery, 'Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur'

archive.org/details/aram...

Harriet Elizabeth Walker, 'JEWISH BABYLONIAN ARAMAIC BOWL TEXTS: Uncovering the Operational Mechanisms
of the Practice using Digital Methods'
www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...

'“All of the bowls are written in Eastern Aramaic, but they are in different dialects,” Gross says, namely Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, which is a Hebrew script; Syriac, the language used in many early Christian texts; and Mandaic, used by a religious group in southern Iraq called the Mandaeans.'

'the first critical academic text on incantation bowls [was] published in 1913 by James Montgomery, then an assistant professor at Penn and a professor at the Philadelphia Divinity School. That book, “Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur,” is still cited today.'

'“The bowls were buried upside down under the floors of houses in strategic locations—under the door sills, in the corners of rooms—likely to protect against evil demons,” says Penn archaeologist Richard Zettler... “Sometimes they put bowls together, rim to rim, and sealed them.”'