History

On both days, the extraordinary beauty of the flame arising from the funeral pile was noticed. The weather was beautifully fine. The Mediterranean, now soft and lucid, kissed the shore as if to make peace with it. The yellow sand and blue sky intensely contrasted with one another: marble mountains touched the air with coolness, and the flame of the... See more

We also discuss, among other things: decapitated ostriches, fatal rose petals, and Mary’s robust reappraisal of Marcus Aurelius’s ‘sub-Stoic’ maundering.

What we know for sure about the early alphabet’s background is linguistic and material. It is widely agreed that the early alphabet a) represents a West Semitic language ancestral to Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic; b) but based its signs on the Egyptian writing system, and c) was— as far as we know— not done by scribes or professional writers but... See more