Sublime
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Many were looted simply because they were rich.
William Dalrymple • The Last Mughal
The richest seams for anthropological researchers to tap are the means by which the late Roman population and their fifth- and sixth-century successors used display – in buildings, personal adornments, burial ceremonies and trappings – to express and reinforce ideas about identity, belonging and status.
Max Adams • The First Kingdom
In 260 AD, for example, the Emperor Valerian was humiliated after being taken prisoner and held in “the abject form of slavery”: used as a human footstool for the Persian ruler “by bending his back to raise the king as he was about to mount his horse,” his body was eventually flayed “and his skin, stripped from the flesh, was dyed with vermilion, a
... See morePeter Frankopan • The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
The Death of Secular Messianism: Religion and Politics in an Age of Civilizational Crisis (Theopolitical Visions Book 8)
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All the lands from the rising to the setting sun are subject to me, he went on, which did little to recommend the Pope’s God.
Peter Frankopan • The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
The major groupings looked like this in 1800:
George Friedman • The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond
William Hawkins,