Now, I’m no expert on Babylonian mythology, and some of my information on this is a bit fragmented and sketchy, but apparently there was a myth in which a lot of Mesopotamian law and culture had been handed down by anthropomorphic fish-people before the Flood, after which the fish presumably became less talkative. In commemoration of this legendary past, Babylonian and Assyrian priests and scholars (on at least certain occasions) supposedly wore actual fish costumes. They wore a big fish-head miter and robes with scales and fins. At least, that’s the story I’m putting together from a brief reference in this episode of In Our Time and this JSTOR article.

Now, if anyone has any other reputable information about fish-dressed Babylonian scholars — or decent access to JSTOR, at least — I’d be thrilled to hear about it. This is the kind of bizarre history I like best. I’ve also never been so disappointed with modern academic regalia.

It’s easy to forget that in the 1950s and ’60s Afghanistan had been modernizing rapidly. This article has a collection of photos from the Kabul that was. Notice in particular the Vaccine Research Center and the gathering of Afghan Girl Scouts.

Brontësaurus comes with barrier-breaking feminist vision!

I’m pretty sure that if you like this blog you’d like a graphic novel biography of Bertrand Russell, which is exactly what Logicomix is.

In a bay off the coast of Montenegro there’s a church on an island. The island was built by hand.

The idea that devotional rock-throwing has become an art of creating new terrain, generation after generation, rock after rock, pebble after pebble, is stunning to me. Perhaps in a thousand years, a whole archipelago of churches will exist there, standing atop a waterlogged maze of old pleasure boats and fishing ships, the mainland hills and valleys nearby denuded of loose stones altogether. Inadvertently, then, this is as much a museum of local geology—a catalog of rocks—as it is a churchyard.

Historian, author, and activist Howard Zinn died yesterday on vacation in Santa Monica. Aside from publishing the seminal A People’s History of the United States, Zinn was among the first to call for immediate, unconditional withdraw from Vietnam, helped hide the Pentagon papers, and consistently spoke out for the causes of pacifism and social progress. Good thinker, good speaker, good guy.

There’s a near-permanent lightning storm over Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela:

For 140 to 160 nights out of the year, for 10 hours at a time, the sky above the river is pierced by almost constant lightning, producing as many as 280 strikes per hour. Known as the “Relampago del Catatumbo,” this lightning storm has been raging, on and off, for as long a people can remember.

It’s been storming there since at least 1595.

Neils Bohr was once visited at his country house by a friend of his, another scientist. The friend was astonished to see that Bohr had a horseshoe nailed up above his front door. He asked, “Do you really believe that that brings you luck?”

Bohr said, “No, of course not… but I’m told that they work even if you don’t believe in them.”

I think people in the past were very different to us in the meanings they gave to the world, and that any reading on to them of a constancy of human nature type, of whatever kind, is without foundation. I mean, which sort of human nature do you want to pick? I don’t think this need lead to scepticism about knowing “history” because, to repeat, when we study history we are not studying the past but what historians have constructed about the past. In that sense, whether or not people in the past had the same or different natures to us is not only undecidable but also not at issue. In that sense, the past doesn’t enter into it. Our real need is to establish the presuppositions that historians take to the past. It would therefore be more constructive (though again ultimately impossible) to try to get into the minds of historians rather than the minds of the people who lived in the past and who only emerge, strictly speaking, through the minds of historians anyway, a task this whole book is encouraging. Not so much “all history as the history of past people’s minds” then, but “all history as the history of historians’ minds.”

Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History

In general, the geometric figures are formed by a ditch approximately 11m wide, currently 1-3m deep, with adjacent 0.5-1m high earthen banks, formed by deposition of the excavated soil. Ring ditches have diameters that vary from 90 to 300m. The circular structures are more common in the south, while composite and rectangular structures become more frequent as one moves north (see Figure 2). When there are two or more structures, they are usually connected by embanked roads. Some of the single rectangular structures may have short roads coming out of their mid-sides or corners. Composite figures include a rectangle inside a circle or vice versa.

Pretty cool paper; they used Google Earth to find geoglyphs! Read the full article here (pdf).