andrew phillips

[title] Mobilize against Israel's Death Penalty Bill! [sub-title] A move to legalize the hanging of Palestinians while denying legal access, enforcing isolation, and granting total immunity to those who carry out executions. Picture of woman and man standing comforting each other

Violence and torture against Palestinians in Israeli prison camps—widely documented and condemned by international human rights bodies—has been met with impunity.This impunity has now paved the way for Israel to advance a bill for the execution of Palestinian hostages, denying them any right to appeal and holding them in isolation until execution—within 90 days. The world must act to stop this before it's too late. [Picture] Several men behind prison bars; one man in prison clothing with chains around his wrists giving two 2-fingered victory salutes.

Genocide—especially in a globalized world like ours—is never committed in a vacuum. It is normalized through racist propaganda and legitimised with immoral legislation and policies. From the colonization of Australia and Turtle Island, to the transatlantic slave trade, European colonization of Africa, the Herero and Nama massacres in German Southwest Africa, the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, and the Rwandan Genocide, history makes clear that law and institutions intended to protect people have repeatedly been used by colonial and authoritarian regimes to legitimize mass atrocities against racialised and vulnerable minorities.

Ben-Gvir, the Israeli far-right minister advancing the bill, has openly called for more lethal, cruel, and collectively punitive measures against Palestinians, further exposing Israel's genocidal intent and reliance on global inaction. This leaves no room for delay. Israel must face immediate consequences, including boycotts, sanctions, arms embargoes, diplomatic isolation, and international legal accountability.

Act Now!
Israel is moving to legalize executing Palestinian hostages while denying them legal access, holding them in isolation, and granting total immunity to those who carry out the killings.
This is the logical outcome of decades of impunity, racist dehumanization... 1/2

One of the bricks commemorating Untaš-napiriša’s construction of the ziggurat (zag-ra-tu₄-me) cdli.earth/artifacts/24...

Israel’s parliament will be voting shortly on a law that would permit the death penalty for Palestinians only.

If settlers attack a Palestinian and they fight back, they can be hanged in 90 days.

Western-style illustration of female reproductive organs in a 17th-century Ottoman manuscript on anatomy.

Another Step in the Weaponization of Aid: Israel Bans Humanitarian Agencies in Gaza In late December 2025, two months after the much-lauded ceasefire agreement that was meant to end the physical destruction of Gaza and bring a significant increase in desperately needed aid, Israel an...

My latest for @arabcenterdc.org: Another Step in the Weaponization of Aid: Israel Bans Humanitarian Agencies in Gaza

Read here: arabcenterdc.org/resource/ano...

3D-model of a section of a runestone, the Læborg-stone, which reads: þurui : trutnik : sina ‘Thyra, his queen’.

Did Viking Age rune-carvers have distinct 'handwriting'? #NationalHandwritingDay ✍️
Experienced rune-carvers had their own styles and techniques, allowing researchers to pinpoint runestones to the specific carvers who made them using 3D-scanning.

🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

🏺 #Archaeology

Umer Khalid’s water strike starts tonight if the UK government does not enter negotiations with Prisoners for Palestine. The human body can survive, on average, 3 days without water. The genocide in Gaza continues, solidarity with a comrade risking his own life to oppose it

You spin me right round! Got to meet our @rialibrary.bsky.social manuscript of the week, an amazing early 15th-century astronomical and medical tract in Irish complete with a volvelle and diagrams (RIA MS B ii 1) 📜✨

Four lines of cuneiform text on a clay tablet and line art of the same text (AO 5385)

from a Sumerian drinking song

kaš naŋ‐e me‐e sig₁₀‐ga‐ŋu₁₀‐ne
kurun₂ naŋ‐a ul ti‐a‐ŋu₁₀‐ne
šag₄ ḫul₂‐la ur₅ sag₉‐ga‐ŋu₁₀‐ne
šag₄‐ŋa₂ šag₄ ḫul₂‐la ŋal₂‐la‐bi

while I'm drinking beer (𒁉 kaš)
while I'm drinking kurun happily
with joy in the heart and a contented liver
my heart is a heart full of joy!

Lepus leaping.

From the Aratea, a 9th-century manuscript on astronomy featuring constellations comprised of words. More here: https://buff.ly/34uIsEa

Why did Hammurabi write his law code?

(Music: Song of the Water, Al Andalus Ensemble)

‘I could not stay silent’: Palestinian prisoner tells of sexual abuse in Israeli jail Sami al-Saei has defied social stigma to speak out about what a report calls a ‘grave pattern’ of sexual violence

Sami al-Saei said he heard the Israeli prison guards who raped him laughing through the assault, before they left him blindfolded, handcuffed & in agony on the floor to take a cigarette break.

Hei has defied social stigma to speak out about what a report calls a ‘grave pattern’ of sexual violence.

Yr eitem dan sylw heddiw a restrir yng nghampwaith Daniel Huws

Llyfr Ffortun
Prif destun y llyfr yw astroleg, cylchred y lleuad a'r tywydd.

Today’s featured item listed in Daniel Huws Magnus Opus

Fortune Book
The main text focusses on astrology, the lunar cycle and the weather

1685-1688 BMSS/4

The As and Bs of titi monkey linguistics: why emotional communication is not the enemy The alarm call sequences of titi monkeys (genera Plecturocebus, Callicebus and Cheracebus) have sparked important debates over whether they exhibit parallels with human language. Some researchers con...

🚨New animal linguistics paper🚨

Together with @geoffreymesbahi.bsky.social and @maelmleroux.bsky.social, we tried to finally answer this question: Do titi monkeys have complex syntactic skills?

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

#OnThisDay
On 2024 Jan 19, Maddalena Poli @madpoli.bsky.social shared with us several new online resources and databases for the study of ancient Chinese manuscripts, including 戰國竹簡全文資料庫, 中國古代簡帛字形辭例數據庫 , 開放古文字字型庫, and 漢語多功能字型庫.

Read more:
🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2024/01/19/o...

Reminder that the United States led the charge to delegitimise UNRWA in 2024. The Biden administration and most of the Democrats in Congress passed a law banning the US from funding it, a policy which Trump extended. UNRWA is (was) the main organisation responsible for feeding refugees in Gaza.

Line art of cuneiform text in Sumerian

Prayer-letter from the priest Kug-Nanna to the god Ninšubur

tukum-bi diŋir-ŋu₁₀-ra an-na-kam
šag₄ ib₂-ba-zu ga-ab-huŋ-e, ur₅-zu he₂-bur₂-e

if it pleases you, my god
let me pacify your furious heart (𒊮 šag₄), so that your spirit (𒄯 ur₅, “liver”) will be appeased

cdli.earth/artifacts/46...

"Winter is now used as a weapon..."

Australian doctor Nada Abu Alrub explains that Israel is weaponising the weather to kill more Palestinians

In passing she also mentions how Israel blocked a groups of doctors from entering Gaza because they had a stethoscope on them.

٢٣ — إِنَّ وَرَاءَ الأَكَمَةِ مَا وَرَاءَهَا أَصْلُهُ أَنَّ أَمَةً وَاعَدَتْ صَدِيقَهَا أَنْ تَأْتِيَهُ وَرَاءَ الأَكَمَةِ إِذَا فَرَغَتْ مِنْ مِهْنَةِ أَهْلِهَا لَيْلاً، فَشَغَلُوهَا عَنِ الإِنْجَازِ بِمَا يَأْمُرُونَهَا مِنَ العَمَلِ، فَقَالَتْ حِينَ غَلَبَهَا الشَّوْقُ: حَبَسْتُمُونِي وَإِنَّ وَرَاءَ الأَكَمَةِ مَا وَرَاءَهَا. يُضْرَبُ لِمَنْ يُفْشِي عَلَى نَفْسِهِ أَمْرًا مَسْتُوراً.

No. 23

"There's something beyond the hill."

inna warāʾa al-akamati mā warāʾahā

The story is a servant wanted to meet her lover beyond a local hill but the people she worked for gave her too much work and she couldn't go and said this.

Said when one reveals something they had kept secret.

nirŋal-e (authoritative [one] | ergative)
anam (what[ever])
b-i-n-dug (it | about, regarding smth | he/she | to say)
nu-zid (not | to be true)

The dedication inscribed on the back of the statue

Line art of cuneiform text

Another timely one

nir-ŋal₂-e a-na-am₃ bi₂-in-dug₄ nu-sag₉
“Whatever the authority said, it was not good” (also attested as nu-zid, ‘not true’)
cdli.earth/artifacts/22...

No. 20

"Through just a narrow opening great calamities may be seen within."

inna l-khaṣāṣa yurā fī jawfihā al-raqam

The meaning is that something momentous may be hidden within something modest or trivial.

Children expected to die of hunger in Darfur ‘within days’, says UN Sudan chief UN's humanitarian coordinator Denise Brown warns of 'horrendous' conditions 1,000 days into the brutal war

Children in Darfur are expected to die from hunger ‘within days’ as famine conditions persist more than 1,000 days into Sudan’s brutal conflict, UN warns.

Small cuneiform tablet with several lines of cuneiform text (TMH 05, 065)

Hand copy of cuneiform tablet

Maths exercise from Nippur (ca 2500-2340 BCE), here the short side (𒊕 sag) of a rectangle is calculated when the long side (𒍑 uš) and area (𒃷 gán) are known

uš = 𒐕𒐌𒑏𒃻𒁺, 67½ ninda (405 m)
gán = 𒁹𒃷, 1 iku (3600 m²)

The answer is given as
𒁹𒃻𒁺𒐊𒌑𒈫𒋗𒆕𒀀𒐈𒋗𒋛𒑚𒋗𒋛, 1 ninda 5⅔ cubits 3⅓ fingers (8.89 m)

As for its production in the vocal tract, the /h/ sound is produced in the larynx, pairing only with the glottal stop /Ɂ/, not only in terms of place of articulation but also in terms of voicing; hence, both are voiceless sounds (i.e., produced with no vocal fold vibration). However, contrary to /Ɂ/, which is produced by totally constricting the flow of air, /h/ is produced by letting air escape (breath). What this means is that although both are voiceless laryngeals, one blocks the passage of air (allegorically: diabolically black), and the other opens it (allegorically: celestially white). Interestingly, some linguists argue that both sounds were originally one phoneme. For example, Lehmann (1993) put forward the hypothesis that there had once been an h-like laryngeal sound that was originally two separate sounds: a glottal stop [Ɂ] and a glottal fricative [h]. Beeks (1995) suggested that the glottal stop is one variant of /h/. In more technical terms, whereas the /h/ is a phoneme on its own, /Ɂ/ is just an allophone of /h/ that is realized in some specific environment(s). In the Nawdm language of Ghana, the glottal stop is written ɦ, capital Ĥ.

What a mess. My personal highlight: /Ɂ/ is the phoneme of the devil

A Palestinian mother and her to severely malnourished children, victims of the genocide perpetrated by Israel.

This is what Zionism is, it's death, it's destruction, it's terror, it's greed, it's genocide. This is what the IDF and Israel do, they kill and steal. You Mr Dynlacht and Ms Sánchez are twisting and abusing the memory of the Holocaust to support the annihilation of the Palestinian nation.

Small clay tag with three proto-cuneiform signs

5,300-year-old administrative clay tag from the Uruk IV period, bearing the proto-cuneiform signs SANGA (𒋃), GIR₃ (𒄊) and DUB (𒁾). While the underlying linguistic content remains unclear, it could perhaps be read as “basket of temple official (sanga) Bull (personal name)” cdli.earth/artifacts/2207

LJS 57 is a collection of astronomical texts, including works on eclipses, an introduction to astrology, the zodiac, and astrology concerning humankind collectively, with numerous tables, diagrams, and illustrations. Written in Catalonia, ca. 1361 #medievalsky

Online: bit.ly/3C7Owmh