It’s good to see that this ancient sweet chestnut has put out some vigorous foliage this year - it looked quite dead in winter. #ancient#tree#Scotland#Perthshire
Green monkeys & their cousins were imported to delight the rich. #Cleopatra had one & many pharaohs. They were beloved enough to be mummified.
Despite their popularity, the Egyptians were #bad owners.
#Malnutrition & lack of exercise & light caused most monkeys to die between the ages of 6-10, while they live until around 13 in modern #captivity & age 12 in the #wild.
Sumer. First civilization we seem to know, and quite developed for a first one. It thrived in Mesopotamia, but, according to Sumerians themselves, they came there “across the sea”. We haven't found any place with traces of earlier Sumerian-like culture, though. Oh, there are ideas, many ideas about it, all equally founded or unfounded; probably no one mentioned Antarctica, but I won't be surprised if someone did. Their language doesn't give a clue; it seems different from all language families we know (oh, there are ideas, many ideas… and so on). Maybe similar languages went extinct, like Sumerian itself. Maybe it was isolated from the beginning.
The language… All that's left are clay tablets, covered with cuneiform, not unlike something chickens produce every time they walk on mud. Seems like wonder, but it has been deciphered. Seems like… what's so much more than wonder? Wonder²? that its phonetics can be reconstructed. Sure, with doubts, but still. And four thousand years after the language went silent, someone actually tried to sing oldest epic we know, Sumerian of course.
We know nothing about their music. The instrument used looks similar to ones depicted in Sumerian reliefs, the melody is pure speculation. But the words are state-of-the-art Sumerian, you won't get anything better in this place and time. Not since four millenia.
Battle of Actium (www.trustpast.net)
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