Abigail Tan

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)

Stele of the Vultures, commemorating the victory of Lagash over Umma

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)

Some thoughts on perception/outreach: I've found outside attitudes towards cuneiform/ANE history tend to be split between A) "it's a really cool thing to learn to be able to read clay tablets" and B) "this is synonymous with being really old" (1/n)

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

There I go again, adding a passage on a Luwian text to my manuscript on Northwest Semitic poetics. Will I ever learn.

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!

I went a bit mad in the Vilnius souvenir shops, but you don’t know you need a chocolate map of the ethnographic regions of Lithuania until you see a chocolate map of the ethnographic regions of Lithuania

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.”

How learning Akkadian signs has been going today

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

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

September 1, 2025

This is incredibly important to keep going, and the potential for outreach is clearly there - in my experience many people outside of the field show a lot of initial interest in cuneiform when encountering it

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

And this is especially pertinent, not only with regard to our own approaches to understanding the world, but also to counter the misappropriation of history by the alt-right (3/4)

I don’t think the value of learning (esp. language-heavy fields) ought to need defence. But we must push back as hard as we can against assaults on it. War reminded the scholars of 1939 of the fragility of their existence, but it was there all along. (2/4)

In light of the recent university department cuts, one may refer to CS Lewis’ sermon “Learning in Wartime” on the importance of the continuous pursuit of knowledge in the face of adversity. (1/4)

Excited to be editing Ancient History and European History for 2026 ACF Nationals, which has now been announced: hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewt...

illos futuentes stultos qui universitates regnant, ut defutuantur.

I only did a little Latin when I was at school (7th-8th grade UK equivalent). I picked up LLPSI over the summer a few years ago (while a non-classics university student) and found the approach of not focusing on the “grammar-translation method” worked well for me, though I only had time for book 1

This is but one large part of why I will always uphold how no, the ancient world was not a nice time to be alive, nor was even a few decades ago compared to now. Longing for the “good old days” that never existed, even for much more benign reasons than this, is flawed and should not be desired.

Congratulations!