Studenda Mira

The current, holiday edition of The Economist has a good read on Fastnet Rock , the southernmost point in Ireland. Little more than a jagged hunk of slate protruding from the Atlantic, the Vikings called it Hvastann-ey ("Sharp-Toothed Island"), while its Irish name is An Charraig Aonair ("The Rock that Stands Alone"). Since 1854, it's been home to two successive lighthouses. The current one has been (sometimes just) standing against the fury of the ocean since 1903. The chief foreman of its construction, a stonemason named James Kavanagh, was singleminded in his devotion to his duty: He lived on the rock continuously for ten to 12 months of each year from August 1896 to June 1903, sleeping on a damp bed of rock close to the landing strip in quarters carved out of the rock face, known to this day as “Kavanagh’s hole”. The project ultimately cost him his life: Seven years of living in a hole in the rock, progress frustrated by maverick tides and his delayed shi

It doesn't seem to be working yet , but it would not be an exaggeration to say that this is something I've been anticipating for years . I'm already wearing out the "Check for Updates" button in Google Earth. Very exciting!

Adrian Murdoch has returned to the blogosphere . I hope to be able to follow suit soon.

There are bad ideas, and then there's this . It's fortunate that Augustus can't spin in his grave, else there'd be an 80-meter hole forming in the Campus Martius...

Jeff Sypeck's put up a great post placing the Russia-Georgia conflict over South Ossetia in a much wider historical context . In a very roundabout way, is it all the fault of the Huns? Perhaps not, but Jeff shows how the threads in the great tapestry can, as they so often do, lead to unexpected places.

In May, Jeff gave me a neat gift for my graduation: an autographed copy of Philip Freeman's new biography of Julius Caesar . For someone like me, whose knowledge of Caesar was mostly derived from textbooks, fictionalized portrayals and an incomplete reading of the Penguin edition of his Gallic War , Freeman's book was a wonderful way to fill many of the gaps. Indeed, a desire to introduce Caesar to readers who might know little more than his name was the motivation for Freeman, chair of Classical Studies at Luther College in Iowa. In a preface that will disarm those critics who might wonder why the world needs another biography of Caesar, Freeman describes how asking his bored Latin class who Caesar was prompted an animated discussion and led him to wonder how many people really knew "the true story of Caesar." In writing this book, Freeman aimed "simply to tell the story of Caesar's life and times" without joining the legions of commentators who h

Elagabalus isn't a household name like Caligula, Nero, or even Honorius. Probably more than his better-known peers, however, Elagabalus fits the stereotype of the ineffectual, do-nothing emperor who was far more interested in art, music, fashion, or just about anything else than he was in the business of governing. He is the subject of today's " Featured Article " on Wikipedia, so perhaps he'll make up a tiny bit of ground on the name recognition front. Judith Weingarten wrote a fantastic series of entries last year on some of the women who pulled the levers behind the curtain of the Severan dynasty. After you read the Wikipedia article, have a look at her take on Elagabalus through the nervous eyes of his grandmother, Julia Maesa. [Photo credit: Giovanni Dall'Orto]

When considering the problem of modern archaeological plunder, I'm probably not alone in reflexively picturing stubbly-faced Bulgarian men with metal detectors, spades and flashlights, rummaging through the Italian countryside at night in search of illegal antiquities. I don't know how accurate that image is, but I've spent so much time trying to learn about the cradles of Western civilization that I often overlook the fact that my country, too, has an archaeological record, and that it can also fall prey to looters . What I find interesting about that case is that the grave robber, since deceased, was apparently an enthusiastic amateur historian and was regarded as a local authority on the subject. It's not tough to imagine him believing, misguidedly, that he was somehow acting as a preservationist for a Civil War cemetery that otherwise might have been forgotten in a dusty archive. Though I don't doubt the good intentions of the real preservationists who've

After the last post , I poked around the library a bit to see if I could find more substantive information on Yemen's Akhdam and their traditional association with the region's 6th C. Aksumite conquerors. I found "Akhdam tribe in servitude," a 1976 Geographical article by James Horgen. His version of the "commonly held myth about their ancestry...heard from both illiterate tribesmen and learned scholars" goes something like this: After 570, Sayf ibn dhi-Yaz'an, the Jewish Himyarite aristocrat who'd successfully entreatied Sassanid Persia to deliver his people from Aksumite Christian dominion, was installed as Persia's vassal. He killed the surviving Aksumite fighters, save for a few who were kept as a ceremonial guard for his processions. Ceremonial or not, the Aksumites still carried spears. They played along with the pomp for a while, but one day, they turned those spears on Sayf ibn dhi-Yaz'an and assassinated him. This prompted the

A New York Times travel article inspired me last March to write about the late antique history of Yemen , which saw the Abyssinian Christian empire of Aksum (located in what's now Ethiopia) displace Yemen's Jewish rulers, only to be overcome by Sassanian Persia and, finally, the first Islamic caliphate. Today, the Times's Robert Worth writes about the plight of the Akhdam , a hereditary Yemeni underclass whose origin dates at least to medieval times. What caught my attention was the popular Yemeni conception of their background: They are reviled as outsiders in their own country, descendants of an Ethiopian army that is said to have crossed the Red Sea to oppress Yemen before the arrival of Islam. I think that sort of folk wisdom is too often dismissed out of hand. One has to be careful, of course, because the solutions offered by such sources can be very convenient, and one only has to consider the many competing folk origins of Ireland's Traveler people to see how q