Important new paper on archaeological looting in Syria: - Looting actually declined from 2014-2016 during the rise of ISIS. It rapidly increased after ISIS was defeated. - Incredible destruction from militarization of sites, especially in the Turkish occupied zone. www.mdpi.com/2571-9408/9/...

Bookmarked to read later, but here's a Roman glass drinking horn c. 200-400 AD found at Laitila, Finland. From the Finnish National Museum in Helsinki.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't.

Oh no.

Wait until they find out about the Armenian Chapel of St. Helena in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre!

This is from a AI slop history account I keep seeing on Facebook. Notice any problems with this picture?

I mean, this is just a massive LOL. The verb "to dwell, inhabit" is yašab in Hebrew and ašābu in Akkadian. NWY (or namû/nawû in Akkadian) is a word for marginal grazing land (only good for sheep/goats). AI is going to enable a whole new generation of nonsense pseudo-scholarship.

2014 political cartoon that captures this problem quite well.

...not great, not terrible?

Here's a great new paper, arguing that the Euphrates - or more precisely its precursors - once flowed west into the Mediterranean! Plate edge deformation at the end of the Miocene directed it towards its current course. Incredible visualizations in this paper too! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The TN Constitution has even stronger protections for religious freedom and separation of church and state than the Bill of Rights! law.justia.com/constitution... But that doesn't matter if you think words can mean whatever you want them to mean.

My 3-year old found a crinoid in the back yard.

That crest is not making much sense for a hen (and with the short tail, it would have to be a hen). So what is it? My best guess is that it's an Asian houbara bustard. The males have a head crest, and it's a game bird so it makes sense that it's depicted alongside an ostrich.

Here's why you always trace it to the original source: Multiple sources told me there's a chicken in the Tell Halaf reliefs. This would be the earliest domestic chicken in the Near East (9th century BC), so I looked up the site report on AMAR. This doesn't look like any chicken I've ever seen!

Apparently if you were an Assyriologist in 1924 you could just publish one of your conference papers completely unedited. Like, in your handwriting without typesetting.

The thing I love about letters is that you get an authentic look inside people's lives from thousands of years ago, and what you see is that people are still people. Like Bahianu here, who is too scared to ask a woman out that he likes, so he asks the governor of Nippur to ask her for him instead.

It's out! It's out! Tawny Holm's long-awaited translations of Aramaic court tales from the Persian Empire is out! Ahiqar, P. Amherst 63, the Inaros cycle (?), and tales from Qumran. (Now, if only I had a spare $100 to buy it!) cart.sbl-site.org/books/061530P

I thought this method of phrasing a query sounded familiar. (SAA 4 3 - omen query to Shamash by Esarhaddon)

Carrying pet hedgehogs. Tomb of Kagemni, 6th Dynasty. From The Animals of Ancient Egypt: Then and Now by Richard Hoath and Salima Ikram.

One of my students made Roman globi (from Cato the Elder's recipe from De Agricultura) for the last day of class this week!

I just learned this was the state flag of Florida in 1845 and this might be the most hilarious state flag of all time. From Florida Dept of State website: "because of a controversy surrounding its motto, it never became an official state flag"

There is no reason why prediction markets should be allowed to legally exist:

Took a minute during the last week of my Modern Middle East class to introduce my students into some of the truly insane imagery produced during the last decade and a half.

Are these emotional support activities in the room right now?

I'm teaching about the Congo today. Here's Zaire's interior minister Leon Engulu Baanga Mpongo in 1975: "God has sent a great prophet, our prestigious Guide Mobutu... our Messiah...Our gospel is Mobutism. This is why the crucifixes must be replaced by the image of our Messiah."

Proud to announce the contract is signed for my new book forthcoming next year with Penguin Press!

Congratulations! I can't wait to read this!

To everyone who hasn't updated their priors since 2005 or so: It's 2026. The United States is the world's #1 oil producer and #2 oil exporter. Imports from all Persian Gulf states combined account for only 4.8% of US oil consumption. ~75% of US oil imports come from North & South America.

Yup. I also will not use AI to create lecture materials or grade students' work. We need a parallel professor's pledge. www.writersagainstai.net/essay