Texts in Context:Darkness on the Mountains By Gabriel Blanchard Here we turn from “the contemplative Sphinx” and “garden-girdled Babylon”1 to a small, enigmatic people, as few in number […]
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The stage is now set for the Early Iron Age, much of which could be likened to a statue with a golden head, a silver chest, a bronze belly …
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Texts in Context:Timeline of the Bronze Age By Gabriel Blanchard A majority of the dates below are approximate and/or conjectural. Those that are especially uncertain are noted with
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Texts in Context:The Late Bronze Age Collapse By Gabriel Blanchard All earthly things come to an end. The Late Bronze Age was no exception; and when it fell,
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At its height, the Bronze Age had almost everything we mean by civilization today: war, taxes, commerce, politics, gaudy monuments, and something called “Amazon.”
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The atmosphere of the Bronze Age, alien as it is to us today, may appear savage at first glance; but this belies a very different quality that can be discerned in its literature …
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Strange shapes move half-visibly in the mists of time; but as the grey recedes, often as not, we seem to find not a window but a mirror.
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Disentangling traditional myth, archæological fact, and anthropological speculation is a tricky business, which—in a lucky break for historians—can be left to prehistorians.
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History can be tricky, even when one is not being pursued by a rough-and-tumble college professor declaring that the artifact we are trying to study “belongs in a museum.”
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Time is sometimes depicted as an ouroboros, a serpent eating its tail, a symbol of cyclical recurrence. History is like a bask of crocodiles: they are related to snakes, but have extra features that may distract us, to our peril.
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