ancient history 
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SOURCE: Yale News
8/10/2021
Yale, Historians Honor the Contributions of Donald Kagan
Donald Kagan is remembered as a prolific and influential scholar of Ancient Greece and an engaging teacher with a gift for narrative and storytelling. He was also a key figure in the linkage between political conservatism and classical tradition.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
5/16/2021
Mary Beard Keeps History on the Move
"I spent part of my career lamenting that there weren’t more female authors in the ancient world. Well, you can mourn the lack of those authors forever, but you’re not very likely to find more. But you can engage with how gender is defined."
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
5/3/2021
Ancient Egypt for the Egyptians
New books and a documentary consider the entanglement of colonialism with the rise of academic Egyptology.
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SOURCE: New York Times
3/10/2021
Is a Long-Dismissed Forgery Actually the Oldest Known Biblical Manuscript?
Idan Dershowitz claims that a manuscript fragment denounced as a forgery in 1883 is authentic and is a precursor document to the book of Deuteronomy. If he's right, it would be the oldest known biblical manuscript.
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SOURCE: New York Times
3/6/2021
How a Disaster Relief Program Changed the Roman Empire for the Better
The 10,000 Pompeiians who evacuated the city ahead of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD benefited from the redistribution of the property of nobles who didn't.
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SOURCE: New York Times
2/25/2021
Searching for Our Urban Future in the Ruins of the Past
Annalee Newitz's book on lost cities debunks the idea of sudden, catastrophic collapse. But the death of cities does show that humanity is vulnerable to change that makes centuries-old ways of life untenable.
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2/28/2021
The Original Storming of the Capitol
by Stephen Dando-Collins
The January 6, 2021 siege of the Capitol in Washington DC has eerie parallels with a much earlier event, the AD 69 siege of the Capitoline Mount in Rome.
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SOURCE: New York Times
Ancient Rome Has an Urgent Warning for Us
by Kyle Harper
It's simplistic to look to the classics as instructions for political or social conduct, but the study of the past should inform our awareness of the power of nature to affect social and political life.
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SOURCE: New York Times
2/6/2021
In Beleaguered Babylon, Doing Battle Against Time, Water and Modern Civilization
The ancient city of Babylon is a World Heritage Site, but it faces threats old and new. As some of its walls crumble, preservationists are fighting to preserve the past.
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SOURCE: Discover
11/29/2020
The Complicated History of Religion and Archaeology
Modern archaeology has largely succeeded in instituting professionalization and historical rigor to the study of sites of theological significance, but the discipline has a long and continuing historical entanglement with efforts to find proof of religious doctrines.
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SOURCE: New York Times
11/4/2020
How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?
"Contemporary society has built-in vulnerabilities that could allow things to go very badly indeed — probably not right now, maybe not for a few decades still, but possibly sooner."
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SOURCE: History.com
10/9/2020
How Hammurabi Transformed Babylon Into a Powerful City-State
Hammurabi's governing strategies of building support through public works, pursuing information, and self-promotion are not unfamiliar to contemporary politics.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
7/25/2020
Ancient Teeth Show History of Epidemics is Much Older than we Thought
Scientists and archaeologists now believe that the plague bacteria, which caused the medieval Black Death, infected humans roughly 5,000 years ago in the Stone Age.
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6/7/2020
Contagion and Recovery in the Hittite Empire
by Eva von Dassow
The progress of an ancient plague shows that when faith--in gods or medical research--fails, it's a long road to safety.
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SOURCE: New York Times
5/11/2020
The Elites Were Living High. Then Came the Fall.
Modern cities can learn from the fate of the collapsed civilizations at Ugarit and Mycenae.
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SOURCE: MPR News
1/13/20
A Beautiful World: Ancient texts reveal Aztecs’ history in their own words in Camilla Townsend's Latest Book
Camilla Townsend’s new book, "Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs," documents the story of the Aztecs from an entirely new perspective, that of the Aztecs themselves.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
1/13/20
Why are there seven days in a week?
by Kristin Heineman
The Babylonians, who lived in modern-day Iraq, were astute observers and interpreters of the heavens, and it is largely thanks to them that our weeks are seven days long.
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SOURCE: History Today
1/2/20
Carving our names on great monuments is a millennia-old tradition, but why do we do it?
by Laura Aitken-Burt
The earliest graffiti of a person’s name on a monument has been identified by the historian Lionel Casson in a cave at Wadi Hammamat in Egypt – the name of Hena, an official under Menutuhotep III in 2000 BC, is chiselled into the sandstone alongside a list of his achievements.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
12/16/19
A museum’s 3,500-year-old disposable cup shows the desire to avoid dishwashing is ancient
One is a paper discard from the 1990s. Researchers believe the other, made from clay, may have held wine before it was thrown out after an ancient party on the island of Crete.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
12/12/19
Children in the ancient Middle East were valued and vulnerable — not unlike children today
by Shawn Flynn and Kristine Garroway
The choices that societies make concerning the treatment of children can bring about the greatest of debates and prompt significant political action.
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