LINTEL FRAGMENT, red slate sculpture ~ carving Adam Paul Heller

Triad of Rawer

Old Kingdom, 5th Dynasty, ca. 2498-2345 BC. Excavations of Selim Hassan, 1929-1930. Now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. JE 66615

Quartzite triad statue of Rawer; standing, left leg forward, arms along the body, hands closed in fist, same garment, the central figure wearing round plait wig; the two others have long wig. Inscription on the back.

Owner of G 8988. Son of Itisen and Hetepheres. Entrance architrave, lintel and facade inscribed for Rawer, identified as sole companion, chief of Nekheb, priest of Horus-Anubis who presides solely over the suite, administrator of the district ‘Star-of-Horus-Foremost-of-Heaven’, sem-priest, director of the kilt, khet-priest of Min, director of the palace.

A large number of other inscribed statues and fragments of Rawer and his family found throughout G 8988 (including JE 66615, a quartzite “pseudo-group” statue of Rawer, and JE 66625, a limestone statue head of Rawer).

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Fic Prompts: Meddling Mar Monday

Back in order again, picking up with the boys being transfered from the tower to their new home. Chapter index can be found HERE

The building didn't look like much. It was the same sandstone and stucco construction as the rest of the city, with two separate staircases and doors going to two separate levels. The lower level had some yellow and white paint around the lintel in designs that were no longer fully discernible, and that was the only touch that indicated the building was inhabited at all. Damas rapped sharply on the lower door and grumbled under his breath.

He'd called ahead, of course. As the evaluator, it was his job to inform city landlords when a new tenant was arriving. But Alma was one of Spargus's more...eccentric individuals. She was an elder, and therefore held a place of honor in the West Quarter as a retired sharpshooter. Damas trusted that she'd keep these young rascals well in hand. But...well, she had always been a bit odd when it came to rent and trading. And she operated very much on her own time and nobody else's.

At last the door opened, and a diminutive woman with a sharply curved spine squinted up at him. She leaned on a driftwood cane and cocked her head to look around Damas to the boys behind him.

"About time someone sent me some more strong backs," Alma wheezed, "Am I supposed to drag my groceries home by my cane?"

Daxter groaned and buried his face in Jak’s scarf. "Noooo, it's another Samos!"

Damas cleared his throat. "No manual labor for another week, Alma. Petros's orders."

Alma blinked her round, brown eyes behind owlish spectacles. "Petros?! Ay, sire, the messenger said they were exiles! You're telling me that beanpole behind you is a minor?"

Mar tiptoed to peer around Damas’s elbow at the woman who was supposed to be their new landlady. For a moment, the elderly woman and the little boy just stared at each other. Then Mar innocently announced, "You look like a dragonowl."

"Mar!" Jak hissed under his breath, and lightly cuffed his younger brother across the back of his head.

"Hey!" Mar twisted to shoot a dirty look at Jak. "What was that for?!"

Alma blinked twice. "He's tiny," she said flatly.

Unbidden, the memory of the children collapsed in the desert surfaced in Damas’s mind. He grimaced.

"Aye. If there's any trouble with upkeep, I'll deal with it."

Blessedly, the old woman didn't point out that usually that was an assigned guardian's job. Damas didn’t feel like having to justify his monitoring of the boys -- or the gut feeling driving him.

Alma shuffled over a step and adjusted her glasses. "You! Tall child!" she beckoned to Jak.

Jak sighed and prepared himself for the kind of inane orders people always gave him. "Yeah?"

With a thump of her cane, Alma declared, "Rent is the second of every month. One whole conch shell, no fragments missing. And no critters inside! Can't abide them little pinchers."

Then she turned to Mar.

"And you! Pequeño, you know how to make bread?"

Mar, Daxter, and Jak exchanged bewildered looks.

"Kinda?" Mar answered cautiously. "Out of rice flour mostly?"

Alma made a face. "Rice flour?" she asked, "What does that taste like? Eh, nevermind. Go wash your hands. You're all helping me make bread."

Then she paused and peered at Daxter.

"Does he shed?"

Indignantly, Daxter puffed himself up and stood.

"He does not, thank you very much! This coat is made for waterproofing!"

Damas raised a hand between them as though cutting off an argument before it could begin.

"This is Daxter," he said calmly. "He is not an animal. He has a....a condition."

"Boy meets dark eco, dark eco wins," Daxter supplied helpfully.

The woman's eyes lit with mild interest. "That so? Here I thought the stuff just killed ya."

She took a dragging step away from the door and pointed to the stairs leading to the upper part of the building.

"You'll be up there, second compartment: the one on the left. But we all eat together. Keeps the lodgers from snacking through all their supplies and into mine."

Jak studied the upper half of the building and nodded. Space for the three of them, shared resources, and a rent he could pick up on the beach. That wasn't bad at all, really. In fact, it reminded him of picking up the once ubiquitous Precursor orbs all over Sentinel Beach to buy power cells from his neighbors. The heat was draining his energy far faster than he would have liked -- apparently Dr. Petros actually did know what he was talking about -- but still Jak itched to get into the water. He wanted to dive below the surf and look for forgotten treasures in the clear blue water, down where no one could bother him but fish.

It took him a moment to realize Damas was speaking to him. Jak tore his eyes from the direction of the sea and blinked.

"Huh?"

Damas frowned. "I said this evening someone will show you where and how to buy food. Help where you can, but keep in mind that if you push yourself too quickly you'll just end up in the recovery ward again."

"Oh." Jak shrugged. "I'll be fine. Hey, uh, how do you get to the water from here?"

Damas lifted an arm to point between two asymmetrical houses. "It's about five minutes' walk due West. You'll have plenty of time to explore after the noon rest. Understood?"

He was testing Jak, seeing whether he could take orders. Jak wasn't sure how he knew that, but he could just feel it. Well, lucky for Damas, Jak already felt somewhat indebted to him. In most cases, he didn't comply with orders unless he was getting something in return. Give and take, tit for tat. Owing a favor meant somebody had power over him -- and Jak had long since learned that someone having power over him meant that he was going to get hurt.

Sure, the desert people acted affronted by the suggestion that a couple of kids owed them for medical treatment, but when it came down to it, a debt was a debt. Jak wanted to investigate this society from a place of equal standing, not as a destitute castaway. He would tread lightly until he had the measure of these people.

"Fine, fine." He folded his arms and tried to downplay his eagerness to explore.

Precursors, how long had it been since he'd gotten to explore someplace new? At least he had that to look forward to.

"Thanks," he added, absent-mindedly.

Damas studied him for a moment, then nodded. "Prioritize your recovery over physical activity," he directed. "At least until Petros clears you to join the regular chore roster. I'll see you all later."

Then he aimed a sidelong glance at Mar.

"And Seek? Behave."

Daxter burst out laughing at the parting words. Mar folded his arms and did his best to glower menacingly at the king. Predictably, it was far more endearing than threatening. Damas cracked a smile and waved him off.

"You'd better get going if you want to help Alma make bread," he said, pointing behind them.

Mar hesitated. He wanted to ignore The Snitch as a matter of principle. But fresh bread was fresh bread, and he wasn't going to turn it down. He grabbed Jak's hand and towed him into the house behind him. No way was he doing all this lady's kitchen chores by himself!

Inside, herbs hung in bundles from the rafters, well out of reach of a frustrated animal trying in vain to get to them. It reared up on spindly black legs, dancing back and forth on cloven hooves and bleating piteously. Alma hobbled past it, ignoring its cries.

"Told you I'd get Leif to tie the herbs up if you kept eating them," the woman sniffed.

Dropping back on all fours, the creature bleated again and butted its small head against Alma's side. She pushed it away, nonplussed.

"Don't fuss at me! You were supposed to go back outside once you were weaned!"

Mar shoved past Jak and scrambled over a bootjack and short step to get to the animal.

"What's that?" he asked, staring into bright, slit pupils.

Alma squinted at him. "You never seen a caprid before? That one's a kid. Cabbie: the most spoiled caprid in the flock. Completely rotten."

Mar stroked the baby caprid's sandy brown head. "You have more?!"

Jak crossed the threshold to crouch next to him and run a hand over the caprid's velvety ears. "What do they eat? I didn't see a lot of plants on the way here."

"Cactus, mostly," Alma answered, "And anything else they can fit in their thieving little mouths. I swear if I didn't need the milk for cooking..."

She shook her cane at Cabbie menacingly.

"Half of your cousins: cabrito en salsa! Wham!"

Mar didn't know what cabrito en salsa was, but it sounded like food. He frowned and covered Cabbie's ears.

"Don't listen, kid," Jak said, patting it's short coat.

Their new landlady shook her head as if in despair. "Don't encourage him, he's bad enough already!"

asking you because i seriously consider u one of the best writers i have. read? known exists? anyways im asking how much do u plan when u write? ik uve talked abt ur process (v funny i love how ur mind works id love to poke around [affectionately]) but like. how much do u Plan in Advance? ive been sitting on some ideas for a while and im trying to think down to the SLIGHTEST things and im jus v curious as to? how much you think abt urs b4 sitting down2 write?

I am glad you think I am funny because I think I am funny too.

(Haha but for real I literally jumped into the air. Thank you!)

Here is where I get shifty because I am not an artist, I never have been, I have never quite gotten a handle on the patience required to color inside the lines. Likewise...I am not a plotter.

In general, an Idea Arrives, and then I sit down and write. A lot of the time it starts out as a scene I'd like to read, and I write that scene for 20 minutes or two hours, and after that I roll the dice in the air. If I poke around it long enough, I am morally required to construct everything that had to happen to get me to the Inciting Scene. My favorite thing to write is dialogue, and to convey how someone said something/why they said it, then I have to know the characters a little more. Sort of like eavesdropping on a conversation, and then getting to know a stranger from it.

I have never plotted anything start to finish. I normally have an end or something close to the end, a few enticing snippets, and that's my map. I don't finish original work too often, but it's not abandoned, it's just reworked, reworked, reworked. I have a friend that has original work that won a big well known editing/pitch contest and now has her work in the Query Trenches, and if she was the writing FBI she would lock me in jail for disorderly conduct and missing plotting documents. She says I should try to at least write a first draft through and let that be my guide, but I'm like. Nah. I start a story and I keep writing it and backtracking and rewriting and backtracking and rewriting, but theoretically at the end I have a story I'm satisfied with--- and not a draft I thought was bad a quarter of the way in but kept mudslogging through it. It's not losing progress, it's just rerouting yourself the longer way home so you avoid future traffic.

"Kill your darlings" is a very famous piece of writing advice, and when I was starting out I thought it meant, like, literally killing your characters for the Drama. Now I understand it as if there's a scene I really like or really want to include...sometimes she just has to get sidelined. And that's okay. We can harvest her organs for later. Frankenstein that bitch.

Fanfiction is different. It's fun and loose and I entertain myself. Now you will not swell the rout was a bit more thoughtfully done, that is, I spent more time on it than just being awake at midnight because I thought of something funny. It was not plotted. I didn't know the story was there. I missed martial arts, and then happened to listen in on a conversation about the poem "To an Athlete Dying Young" (A.E. Housman). I didn't come up with Now you will not swell the rout as a fully-fleshed story then, I just added onto a snippet (literally the first three little paragraphs) and stuff connected and then two weeks went by in a mad haze and I had 30,000 words or whatever it was. After that, I've spoken previously that in hold the low lintel up (and now WIP#3) had some "plot" which are events in the comics I want to include, but I think that is more worldbuilding/keeping somewhat adjacent to the source material. Everything original is just up in my head or stored in a random line I want to remember to use later.

(Literally my "plot" bookmark in my google doc is Plot hey here’s a good line and then I proceed to write one very good sentence and seven disembodied dialogue fragments that don't belong together at all).

In the spirit of honesty, I wrote the last line of Now you will not swell the rout and that was supposed to be it. But the fic had such a lovely reception, and I really felt like I grew while I wrote it, and like look there was one big glaring unanswered question just sitting there, right, so. Now I have a series. And 100% of the reason I'm not uploading chapter by chapter is because I know I am not a plotter, I know I'll change things, and I really want to take my time with this and use it as experience for my original work.

So that was way more than you probably meant to ask for, but. In sum: no, I don't plan in advance, I just take a stab and commit literary medical malpractice. Some writing books will have whole sections on plotting, and will have you detail your characters' birthdate, favorite song, food, music, what's the name of their first dog, etc. A lot of people have to have that solid basis ("organization" my writer friend calls it, pfft). I know, personally, that if I go down that rabbit hole I will not get anything done. I will get stuck.

So if you are honest with yourself and won't get stuck making the ideal macaroni map, send plotting advice for the rest of us homies out there ✌️

SVEG OUT

Most of it dissolved upon waking but a couple of lines from last night's/this morning's intense dream retained their form long enough to transcribe and like. I guess my subconscious is going through some apocalyptic Schulzean renewal shit and I just have to wash the dishes about it??? Who talks like this???

Dream fragment: "We will abide here, offerings burnt on the lintel of spring. In the Aesopian language of ash, we remind those who hasten to cross that spring takes its tithe by fire."

Followed by probably the sharpest, clearest "mental image" I've ever experienced: Earth and then end to end cows and bison and turtles - brown and green, with the waxy sheen of bog bodies or matte mineral talismans - that circled the earth in a spiral, more and more burnt till the spiral terminated in shapes that could have been scorch marks or the black impressions left by fossils in riverbeds. And above the equatorial line, juxtaposed at the angle you see in Constructivist art with triangles bisecting circles, there were excavation sites of two tombs, and a voice-over narrating "if we're buried at odd angles to one another, future archeologists won't connect our bones to the same cause." And another voice-over replied "bold of you to assume there will be future archeologists." (Which, lol.)

I'm still so???

Fragment of a 13th century lintel decorated with inhabited foliage, from the main portal of the church of San Nicola in Avezzano, Italy.  The church was abandoned in 1874 and was later destroyed by an earthquake in 1915.

Musée du Louvre, Paris

September 13, 2022

Update on the Maya Site of Sak Tz’i

Three years ago, a team of researchers located the site of Sak Tz’i (White Dog in English). It was colonized by 750 BCE. The team used LIDAR in 2019 to scout out the possible site and found it was a large unknown Maya site. There was a two year Covid deal before the site could be excavated. They have found the site was heavily fortified with stone barricades and wooden palisades. The site was mentioned in doorways lintels at Bonampak in which captives from the site were shown defeated and humiliated. In 2019, while excavating the ball court, they unearthed a stone altar. Beneath the altar he found the spear point as well as obsidian blades, spiny oyster shells and fragments of greenstone. In Maya cosmology flint connoted warfare and the sun or sky; obsidian, darkness and sacrifice. Oyster shells and greenstone were equated with life, vitality and solar rebirth in the sea. A 2-by-4-foot wall panel dated to 775 A.D. revealed tales of battles, rituals, a legendary flood and a fantastical water serpent described in poetic couplets as “shiny sky, shiny earth.” "The glyphs highlight the lives of dynastic rulers such as K’ab Kante’, including when each one died, how they were memorialized and under what circumstances their successors came to the throne. In one glyph, the Sak Tz’i’ ruler appears as the dancing Yopaat, a divinity associated with violent tropical storms. The ax in his right hand is a lightning bolt, the snake-footed deity K’awiil; in his left he carries a “manopla,” a stone club used in ritual combat. The missing panel is presumed to have featured a prisoner of war, kneeling in supplication to Yopaat.” The NY Times has the report here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/science/archaeology-mayan-mexico.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Somewhere To Be / A chapter at a time

The chapel and the tinker

ALFRISCOMBE SHRINE, 1654

THE SHRINE HAD been there for as long as anyone could remember, marking the spot where the spring bubbled up through the rocks; a single standing stone as tall as a man with grey-green lichen filling its carved spirals, and a second stone laid flat at its foot like an altar. There used to be a third stone but that was smashed to pieces years ago, its scattered fragments buried somewhere in the weeds.

Some villagers kept to the old ways still. Desiccated posies bore testament, dark splashes of wine in clay cups, and antlers hanging off nearby branches like a particularly gruesome crop. All to be cleared away now at the baron’s command, all of it; the stones, the rotting timber hut behind, and those disgusting relics as well. No superstitious peasant nonsense must remain to sully this holy site.

As the ground was cleared, the remaining stones pushed over and broken down, a wanderer emerged from the forest path. Tall and swarthy with a heavy pack on his back, he looked like any other gypsy the stonemason ever saw; but since he was a decent man at heart he wished him a good day, enquiring after his health and his travels, even offering a cup of water and a bite of his own meal if the man would care to share.

It bore an unexpected dividend, and not just the warming gleam in the tinker’s eyes as he stepped out of the shadows. He accepted the water gratefully but wouldn’t take more than a sip. “Your men will be needing this more.” he said with a glance up at the sun. “As for your meal, let me contribute.” From the depths of his pack he produced a well-wrapped haunch of venison and cheerfully shared it around. “It’ll spoil before I can finish it.” he insisted against their protests. “It’s you who’s doing me the favour, or would you have this go to waste?”

Over the meal they were happy to discuss the chapel’s plans, since the fellow was so polite and so curious. He particularly admired the design for the roof bosses, a rosette with deep-cut petals that the mason was particularly pleased with. Just as well, as four dozen in all would be needed for the ambitious vaulted ceiling before they’re done, and a few gargoyles besides.

“It’ll be a fine chapel indeed.” the tinker said with a lopsided grin, “If it ever gets finished.”

Long afterwards the mason reflected on that day; it seemed from the moment the tinker said those words, nothing went right. Sinking foundations, cracking lintels, and collapsing walls - before too long the men flatly refused to return to work, even for triple pay. Some curse lingers over the site, they agreed, and as soon as other jobs arose they moved on with relief.

The chapel fell to ruin so quickly you’d barely know there’d ever been a structure there at all. Fine dressed stone gradually got robbed away for doorsteps and windowsills and mounting blocks until there was nothing left but a tumbled mossy outline of the tower base. A generation past you’d barely know it was there unless your horse stumbled on one of the hidden stones. The only sign a chapel was ever planned was the jeering stone demon carved by the stonemason after a heavy night drinking the tinker’s ale. Its twisted grin seemed to be mocking the whole endeavour, perched up on the wall where he left it until the brambles eventually claimed it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DAY ONE OF the dig dawns on a fine sunny morning. Rain clouds are massing out to sea, but with barely any breeze it’ll be hours before they reach the museum.

The site manager consults her clipboard - mainly for show, since she knows everything is in place, from the permits acquired and carefully entered into the system to the license for the skip out in the drive right through to decades of blueprints consulted in case of underground cables. The interns are busy stacking find trays and hand tools ready beside the paved path bordering the lawn. On the other side of the garden wall a catering truck is dispensing a breakfast fit for people with serious work to do; bacon rolls, crumbling dark fruitcake by the slice, scalding builder’s tea in chipped china mugs. ‘Vegan Option’s Available On Request’ according to a handwritten addition to the menu, but a second bulk pack of bacon is already out to defrost in anticipation of the morning’s bestseller.

Approaching eight thirty the lawn fills with people shouting incomprehensible instructions at each other, collecting cones and pulling up stakes, winding up orange tape as they go to clear the way for the backhoe rumbling along from the main driveway.

Archchancellor Cooper himself has graced the occasion, a forty-something man with the shaved head and solid build of a prop forward and with much the same immovable air. Despite his bulk he’s wearing a beautifully-cut suit in heavy charcoal wool; spotless white cuffs emerge precisely half an inch from his jacket sleeves, no more and no less, and the silk tie around his thick neck displays the colour blocks and badge of the local Rotary Club. He’s not here to dig, obviously; the presence of the local newspaper signals he’s here to be photographed shaking hands and possibly holding a polished silver trowel that’s never touched dirt.

Mainder maintains a low-key brooding presence somewhere on the edge of the action, leaning against the high stone wall that borders the lane on the far side. He wasn’t expecting roll-away-the-stone levels of discovery, but despite the scattered cheers from the assembled crowd it’s distinctly anticlimactic. The driver takes up position and, with a theatrical hand raised high for all to see, brings it down on the lever to lower the bucket. It’s some skill, delicately breaking the surface and cutting a neat strip of turf, that he grudgingly agrees is worthy of applause. But after that it’s just doing the same thing another three times before turning the backhoe in a neat manoeuvre and trundling back across to the driveway. The trench is begun, six feet long and roughly the same wide, and all of three inches deep.

Mainder takes a hint from a sudden unobtrusive bustle, of  multiple people realising there’ll be nothing more to see for several hours, all simultaneously and spontaneously deciding they have something they just need to go and check on and good Lord, is that the time?

He himself has nowhere in particular to be, but there’s no point loitering in this spot until something is uncovered. The office looks to be open for the day already, a suitable haven, and no sign of the girl yet.

Good. He’s more than a little uncomfortable with what it might say about his psyche that he’d be dreaming a half-naked woman-child into his midnight bed. That requires some self-reflection, ideally before he next has to look her in the eye. He claims the couch and stretches out for a power nap, still fuzzy from his pre-dawn waking.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Ssshhhh.” Chris mimes as Evie comes through the door. “You’ll wake the baby.”

Confused, she follows his glance to see Mainder stretched out on the couch. “Wow.” she mouths, and moves up the room. “He really made himself at home, didn’t he?”

“I know, right? I keep wanting to fetch him a blanket.”

Sleeping Mainder is a treat to behold, she has to admit. The brooding tension that he usually radiates is entirely absent, with his lean face perfectly relaxed and his long body twisted awkwardly half-on and half-off that much-too-short couch. He looks - there’s that word again, safe, when all the information so far suggests he’s anything but.

Lintel and Relief from the Tomb of the Overseer of Priests and Keeper of the sacred Cattle Mereri, Describing His Exemplary Life - Met Museum Collection

Inventory Number: 98.4.2f First Intermediate Period, Dynasty 9, ca. 2100–2030 B.C. Location Information: From Egypt, Northern Upper Egypt, Dendera, Tomb of Mereri, Behind Temple of Hathor, Egypt Exploration Fund excavations, 1898

Description:

Mereri's titles indicate he had roles of some importance in the cult of Hathor of Dendera, including responsibility for the clothing for attiring the cult image. He built a very large mud brick mastaba at the site. The eastern facade had a single register autobiographical frieze as a cornice. The entrance, surmounted by an inscribed architrave, led via a passage decorated with relief into a long rectangular room where there were thirteen niches with stelae. The owner's false door was located in an inner offering room. From the north side of the mastaba an entrance accessed the burial chamber through a vaulted tunnel.

This fragment depicts Mereri himself holding his staff and a scepter. It is thought to have been placed in the passage leading into the first chamber, probably belonging with two registers of cattle being led into the tomb.

Acca was Bishop of Hexham between 709 and 732. He had been Wilfrid's loyal companion, and succeeded him as Abbot and Bishop. He devoted his time to building the faith in Northumbria, continuing Wilfrid's work to create a great centre of Christian worship and learning in Hexham. The vibrant musical life of the Abbey today can trace its roots back to Acca: he was an accomplished musician as well as an outstanding theologian, and he was determined that music and liturgy in Hexham should be as fine as anywhere in Europe. The Cross that we see today is not complete, and what remains has been re-assembled from several fragments. The two top pieces of the Cross were rescued from the foundations of a warehouse near the site of St Mary's Church in the Market Place, adjacent to the Abbey; and the lower section spent some time serving as the lintel over a farmhouse door in nearby Dilston! Centuries of exposure have eroded the carved decoration of the cross, and the colour that originally enriched it has long since disappeared. But it is still possible to appreciate the dedication of the craftsmen who created it, and who employed their new-found skills to adorn it with the vine scroll, leaves and fruit that we can still see today. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp5fRNmtGdv/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

September 13, 2022

Update on the Maya Site of Sak Tz’i

Three years ago, a team of researchers located the site of Sak Tz’i (White Dog in English). It was colonized by 750 BCE. The team used LIDAR in 2019 to scout out the possible site and found it was a large unknown Maya site. There was a two year Covid deal before the site could be excavated. They have found the site was heavily fortified with stone barricades and wooden palisades. The site was mentioned in doorways lintels at Bonampak in which captives from the site were shown defeated and humiliated. In 2019, while excavating the ball court, they unearthed a stone altar. Beneath the altar he found the spear point as well as obsidian blades, spiny oyster shells and fragments of greenstone. In Maya cosmology flint connoted warfare and the sun or sky; obsidian, darkness and sacrifice. Oyster shells and greenstone were equated with life, vitality and solar rebirth in the sea. A 2-by-4-foot wall panel dated to 775 A.D. revealed tales of battles, rituals, a legendary flood and a fantastical water serpent described in poetic couplets as “shiny sky, shiny earth.” "The glyphs highlight the lives of dynastic rulers such as K’ab Kante’, including when each one died, how they were memorialized and under what circumstances their successors came to the throne. In one glyph, the Sak Tz’i’ ruler appears as the dancing Yopaat, a divinity associated with violent tropical storms. The ax in his right hand is a lightning bolt, the snake-footed deity K’awiil; in his left he carries a “manopla,” a stone club used in ritual combat. The missing panel is presumed to have featured a prisoner of war, kneeling in supplication to Yopaat.” The NY Times has the report here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/science/archaeology-mayan-mexico.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

News - Rock, Paper, Shotgun

💾 ►►► DOWNLOAD FILE 🔥🔥🔥 Get up-to-date with the latest news and understand it too with Lingohack. Listen to and watch authentic BBC World news bulletins and learn key words and phrases that help you make sense of the news. We have another news related series - News Report. This series uses audio news stories to help you learn English. Click here to visit the News Report page. Learn language related to disappearing and reappearing: missing, under the radar, bringing something back, recovering, making a comeback. Learn vocabulary related to medical treatment: trial, monitors, game changer, quality of life, stabilised. Learn language related to physical challenges: comfort zone, gruelling, toughest, reservations, hardships. Learn vocabulary related to change: transformation, re-engineered, bring something back, reappear. Learn language related to sustainability: deal with, breaks down, organic matter, sustainable, pathogens. 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An Eternal Bouquet for the Dead, 4th century B.C.E., Brooklyn Museum: Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art

Fragment of a limestone relief from the left end of a panel (lintel?). In low relief of exceptional quality, a 'formal bouquet' of lotus flowers and buds, papyrus and corn flowers, wsh necklace and two ducks pinioned to a bundle of reeds. Left end and upper edge enclosed within border. Baseline preserved. Condition: Right side of relief badly eroded by sand. Numerous chips on worked surface. Remains of light red paint in one place on upper border. Size: H: 30.3cm; W: 17cm Medium: Limestone, pigment

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/3637

considering the role of the archivist as an oral and not a written one in the pre-industrial revolution era.

a statement pared down to its marrow-bone essentials is a recording of a certain supernatural event. what the eye consumes is (1) a snippet of history that (2) can be borne witness to and distributed, even if not by or to more than the eye itself and the archivist. it is a true event, but it is also a story, in that it is told and it is subjective to the perspective of the teller.

so: several folk ballads follow a similar format. some of my favourites are the well below the valley (also known as the maid & the palmer), and isabel and the elven knight. both detail individual threatening experiences with the supernatural. the well below the valley is itself about strange, impossible personal knowledge.

the recountings of epics such as beowulf and the völsunga saga also remind me of statements in the loose sense. of their being a preservation of a story through oral repetition. these are fictional events, but the idea of communicating history through song and story is an old, old one. (the marriage of story and event comes, for example, in icelandic sagas which simultaneously legend and record, story-told descriptions of some people who genuinely existed and whose descendants can be traced today. )

and so: I have thought of the archivist not as a paper-ink-scholar, but as a bard, a poet. the liminality of that role. sometimes, the inherent magical associations of it.

imagine:

it is midwinter, and the winter howls with a dead mouth, and rakes snowy fingers across your lintels until your hall is near buried. the candles are lit. wide and dark and full of wine as it is, the fire makes the hall of your liege-lord almost unbearably hot, enough that when you doze you dream of cool ice and snow against your cheek. the shadows slick the gaps in the wooden walls like mould, make strangers of your known ones in the half-light.

there is a knock at the door.

you open it to a man.

he tells you: i am a bard, i have come a long way, i need shelter.

you do not refuse him, even with his strange, reflective eyes, the stare he gives you like he is attempting to hollow you out and examine what is left of you, because it is midwinter and you do not leave wanderers in the snow. and the hall gets (is already) close, and hot, and suffocating, and a bard might lift some of that tension.

so you step back, and you allow him in, and he carries no instrument. and you give him a space by the fire. and a cup of mead. and time, to decide what to perform.

the first song he sings is sigurd, or a fragment of him. and oh, don't you know this one, nursery-favourite, familiar-worn-cloth-of-story, well loved and prettily done, worth applause and another drink. a few more fragments. a heroic deed. another.

another ballad. not one you've quite heard of. not quite unfamiliar either. a good story, a story full of night-running wolves and moonlit shelter. but the bard weaves such intricate loops of the man's terror, his desperate weeping, the pounding of his heart as he ran, enough that you wonder if this is based on a personal experience. too real. too visceral, for you to be entirely comfortable. the fire flickers, and the shadows lean closer, like they don't want to miss a word.

the applause still comes. and the congratulations. but different. some softer voiced. some blustering and loud. the bard continues.

this song is a pretty one, two summertime lovers - or it would be, if one had not murdered the other in hopes of marrying higher. it ends with two bodies bones in the river, hair drifting in the current, and what gives you pause is this: the bard sings the town name. and though you're unsure, you think it might be not this town. not the next one over. but the one beyond that. and you think you do remember your (sister, cousin, friend) saying something about a disappearance, perhaps an elopement, but they never found bodies, did they?

the bard does not name the lovers, but they are never found either.

you are all watching him, now. in the reflection of his eyes is your whole company, town, run upside down and strange in the convex window of his cornea.

his voice is low and sweet as he sings to you of a horror that preyed for a year on the town closest to yours. it is a story you already know. they are events that you, shivering, hoping that it would never come to your town, heard of as they happened. he tells it from the perspective of a man hunted by the beast. when he names the beast guthmundr, the hunter with flat grey eyes and strong hands, the man who appeared dead last spring with a knife in his back and teeth just slightly overlong, yellowed, foaming - you are not surprised.

and then he turns to you. the canines of his eyes hook you. unspool you. the threads of your heart wound around this man's voice.

here is what you have done, he says, in a whisper like a promise. and he sings to you of the spiders that sit waiting in your bones, of the creature that you met once in a cave, that sang just as sweetly and tangled you inexorably into its web from that day forth, of how she consumed your friend as you watched, terrified, and could not save him. of your dreams of cobweb and dark corner, and your growing hunger.

no one speaks, when he finishes. his eyes are so very hollow. hungry. the man next to you draws his sword.

outside, the storm rages on.

Odeon of Amman

Philadelphia (Amman), Jordan

2nd century CE

500 seats

Odeon ("singing place") is the name for several ancient Greek and Roman buildings built for music: singing exercises, musical shows, poetry competitions, and the like. Archaeologists have speculated that the Odeon of Amman was most likely closed by a temporary wooden roof that shielded the audience from the weather.

This Odeum is a Roman one, built in the 2nd century CE, at the same time as the Roman Theatre next to it.

Sources and more text below.

“The small theatre, or odeum, faces west upon the open space in front of the great theatre. Its southwest angle is about 5 m. east, and 14 m. north of the northeast angle of the theatre. It was built up entirely from the ground level and  consisted of an outer west wall with five entrances in it, an inner wall, or proscenium, connected with the outer wall by a tunnel vault, two massive towers which formed the parascenia, and a small cavea divided by a single praecinctio. Of these parts, the first, or western wall, with three of its portals is standing to the height of one story; the doorways on the ends have fallen with the collapse of the angles, leaving one jamb of each with the springers of the relieving arches above them; the inner wall is partly preserved, and portions of the vaulting of the passage between the two walls are still in place; the southern tower is intact in two stories, and its west wall rises to a height of about 15 meters, but the opposite tower is a heap of ruins. The exterior curve of the cavea may still be traced at certain points; but the interior is filled with a mass of debris caused by the collapse of the northern tower and the high wall of the scaena, both of which fell inward. The ruin must have long served as a quarry; for almost all the seats that are not buried in debris have been removed. It was possible for me to find only short sections of four seats, at the extreme end on the south, and here I was also able to secure the measurements of the praecintio. It is plain that this building, though badly ruined, in 1881, when Captain Conder gathered the materials for his plan1 of the odeum, was not in the demolished condition in which we found it twenty-three years later·, for there are details in his description that are not to be found today. Captain Conder published only a plan on a very small scale without any details in the cavea; but his description gives a number of accurate measurements. With these as a check I am able to present the accompanying plan (Ill. 34), for which I cannot lay claim to accuracy in details, and a cross-section which is based largely upon conjecture. Plan. It is not possible, from the minuteness of its scale, to ascertain the precise measurements of Captain Conder’s plan of the odeum, where they are not definitely mentioned in the text; but so far as they are obtainable with the aid of the scale of feet given, they are substantially the same as those which I took. The whole structure, from the front wall to the exterior curve of the cavea, measures 35 m., or, according to Captain Conder’s plan, a little over 100 feet; the extreme width of the cavea is 40 in.; in Conder’s plan, about 125 feet; the stage building, at the middle, through both walls and the vaulted passage measures 7.48 m., in the other plan 25 feet. The old plan gives but three portals in the west wall, and makes this wall shorter than the width of the cavea; Captain Conder apparently did not observe that this wall terminates at either end in a door-jamb with the springers of a relieving arch over it; one of these jambs is shown in the photograph3 published by Captain Conder, the other may be seen in Ill. 35. These doors were of the same dimensions as the others, and, when they are restored, the length of the west wall will be equal to the width of the cavea. Captain Conder shows towers projecting inward at either end of the scaena wall; he states in the text that one of these towers measures 11 feet east and west, and 25 feet north and south. By this he must have meant that the north side adjoining the scaena wall measures 11 feet, and that the east wall was 25 feet long outside; for the south wall of the tower, now standing, is nearly 5 m. long. The earlier plan moreover places the centre of the semicircles of the cavea upon a line connecting the angles of these towers; but such a centre will not give a radius long enough to touch the rear curve of the cavea, which we agree is 35 m. from the west wall, without increasing the width of the cavea which we know to be 40 m. The measurement from the wall of the praecinctio at one end, to the corresponding point opposite is 24.15 m. In my plan I have therefore moved the centre backward 4 m. and I have constructed the semicircles of the cavea within the prescribed dimensions. This arrangement gives a space 4 meters wide for the paradoi. Down under the debris on the north side I measured a vault 4 meters wide, east and west, and a series of carved voussoirs of an arch that must have had a span of at least 3.70 m. I believe that the vault was the vault of the parados and that the arch-stones belonged to the arch which opened from it toward the orchestra. Captain Conder found seven rows of seats above the praecinctio; there could never have been more, if there were any passage at the top of the cavea: I found only four rows of seats, and no remains of seats below the praecinctio have ever been reported. Captain Conder describes three vomitoria from the cavea, one in the middle of the curve and one on either side. Only the barest remains of these are now visible. It is evident that these led from the praecinctio down to the level of the ground outside. The side of one such opening in the wall of the praecinctio is still to be seen on the south side at a distance of 5.75 m. from the tower wall. If the height of the praecinctio above the ground level be as I have indicated it, the steps of the vomitoria will descend from the praecinctio to the ground level at the outer curve of the cavea wall, at the same angle as the steps of the scalae within. These exits, of course, had vaults; these are likened, by Captain Conder, to segments of a hollow cone. Supers true hire. Satisfactory measurements of heights are out of the question in a ruin so filled with debris, unless the debris is removed; I have attempted to give a cross section, reconstructed in, what seems to me, the most logical method with the data in hand, and from what we know of the other buildings of a similar character. The ground level is, of course, unobtainable in a ruin of this character; but one may begin with the praecinctio, of which a small section is preserved, and place above it seven rows of seats with a narrow passage above them; parts of a scala are to be seen near the south end; the seats and the praecinctio terminate against the long wall of the tower. Of this much we may be reasonably certain; but the reconstruction of the cavea below the praecinctio depends entirely upon the existence of paradoi passing under the praecinctio and the upper section of seats at their extreme ends (Ill. 34). If there were paradoi at this point, a complete half circle of seats must be provided for within, i. e., east of, the paradoi, and the number of seats must be great enough to furnish height for the entrances on either side. I have assumed that the vault 4 m. wide is the vault of the parados, and that the voussoirs belonged to the arch of the entrance, and have therefore given a height to the lower section of the cavea, that will allow for ten rows of seats and a barrier about the orchestra 70 cm. in height. This arrangement provides for an orchestra 10.75 m. in diameter, and the semicircle of the orchestra, if continued to a circle would be tangent to the front line of a stage 2 m. deep. The standing portion of the south tower still towers above the rest of the ruin (Ill. 35), but in 1881, according to Captain Conder’s photograph, it was much higher, and was estimated by him to be 50 feet, about 17 m. high. This would give a scaena wall of at least that height. From indications in my photograph, as well as that published by Captain Conder, it is evident that there were large arched windows in the first story of the scaena wall above the vaulted passage at the rear of the stage: the jamb of the window and one voussoir are to be seen at the north side of the tower where a short section of the scaena wall is still in situ. It is very doubtful if the front wall of the odeum was carried up for an upper story; there is hardly enough debris to warrant it; yet this might have been carried away for building material; but the fact that the west wall of the tower, and the face of the section of the scaena wall still clinging to the tower, are both faced with draughted masonry, seems to show that they were exterior walls, although the rustication is carried to the base of the tower behind the vaulted passage of the postscenium. The outer wall is of finely dressed smooth ashlar, the portals were provided with arches of discharge above flat, three- piece lintels, the frame mouldings are of good but simple profile. On either side of the middle portal was a semicircular niche, and in the next spaces were rectangular niches with round arches. Beside each relieving- arch there were corbels in the wall which were more probably inserted to sustain the beams of a colonnade than to hold statues. The greater part of the ornamental details of the building has disappeared. The interior contains among its heaps of broken fragments several fine pieces of well wrought friezes and cornices which show that the scaena was richly adorned with entablat- ures. The mouldings of the seats were substantially like those of the great theatre (Ill. 34, detail), and have no resemblance to the detail given by Captain Conder, which must have been made from a broken example. “

(Text is told first hand by Howard Crosby Butler, who wrote the Syria series)

Sources: 1, 2

cast; lintel

Cultures/periods: Maya (original)

Mexico: Chiapas (state): Yaxchilán: Structure 42: Lintel 43

Plaster cast of an architectural fragment: Yaxchilan: Lintel 43, upper part. The lintel depicts Bird Jaguar holding a basket-staff with a K’awil figure on top. An offering bowl is still visible, held by a woman (Lady Bahlam?) whose image is badly eroded/broken off. The inscription is eroded but refers to dancing, and to the woven basket-staff depicted in the image. The name ‘Yaxun Bahlam (Bird Jaguar), the captor of Aj Uk, he of 20 captives, ?the 3 k’atun lord, god-king of Yaxchilan’ is then given, followed by ‘Lady Mut Bahlam, the Lady from Hix Witz, Lady Bah Kab’.

The British Museum