Alternative (and religiously neutral) naming of the traditional calendar era, Anno Domini
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From about the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era through to the fifteenth century, Southeast Asian societies underwent a political transformation that produced the first, early states that were the forerunners of the countries we know today as Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dougald O'Reilly's Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), tells the complicated story of the development of these earlier polities from ‘chiefdoms' to more complex states. The book highlights the role of local factors in the rise of these states, as well as the influence of early Southeast Asia's participation in long-distance trade networks in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
From about the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era through to the fifteenth century, Southeast Asian societies underwent a political transformation that produced the first, early states that were the forerunners of the countries we know today as Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dougald O'Reilly's Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), tells the complicated story of the development of these earlier polities from ‘chiefdoms' to more complex states. The book highlights the role of local factors in the rise of these states, as well as the influence of early Southeast Asia's participation in long-distance trade networks in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
From about the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era through to the fifteenth century, Southeast Asian societies underwent a political transformation that produced the first, early states that were the forerunners of the countries we know today as Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dougald O'Reilly's Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), tells the complicated story of the development of these earlier polities from ‘chiefdoms' to more complex states. The book highlights the role of local factors in the rise of these states, as well as the influence of early Southeast Asia's participation in long-distance trade networks in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology
From about the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era through to the fifteenth century, Southeast Asian societies underwent a political transformation that produced the first, early states that were the forerunners of the countries we know today as Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dougald O'Reilly's Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), tells the complicated story of the development of these earlier polities from ‘chiefdoms' to more complex states. The book highlights the role of local factors in the rise of these states, as well as the influence of early Southeast Asia's participation in long-distance trade networks in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/archaeology
From about the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era through to the fifteenth century, Southeast Asian societies underwent a political transformation that produced the first, early states that were the forerunners of the countries we know today as Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dougald O'Reilly's Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), tells the complicated story of the development of these earlier polities from ‘chiefdoms' to more complex states. The book highlights the role of local factors in the rise of these states, as well as the influence of early Southeast Asia's participation in long-distance trade networks in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From about the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era through to the fifteenth century, Southeast Asian societies underwent a political transformation that produced the first, early states that were the forerunners of the countries we know today as Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dougald O'Reilly's Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), tells the complicated story of the development of these earlier polities from ‘chiefdoms' to more complex states. The book highlights the role of local factors in the rise of these states, as well as the influence of early Southeast Asia's participation in long-distance trade networks in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From about the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era through to the fifteenth century, Southeast Asian societies underwent a political transformation that produced the first, early states that were the forerunners of the countries we know today as Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dougald O'Reilly's Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), tells the complicated story of the development of these earlier polities from ‘chiefdoms' to more complex states. The book highlights the role of local factors in the rise of these states, as well as the influence of early Southeast Asia's participation in long-distance trade networks in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day
Send us Fan MailWe talk with Professor Clemency Montelle all about her work decoding the mathematics of ancient manuscripts. In a wide-ranging discussion, we cover some of the concepts that first arose in India, hear about a mentor who hosted meals based on ancient recipes, and learn how important cultural and historical context is for the questions that mathematicians ask.While she was at the INI, Professor Montelle delivered the Kirk Lecture for the Modern History of Mathematics Programme, which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa2kN-li984 ---This episode was supported by the quantitative research firm G-Research, which has launched a new series of mathematical puzzles called G-Riddles. It's free to try and could win you a cash prize: https://www.gresearch.com/griddles/Living Proof is the podcast of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. The Isaac Newton Institute is a national and international visitor research institute. It runs research programmes on selected themes in mathematics and the mathematical sciences with applications over a wide range of science and technology. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from the UK and overseas to interact in research over an extended period.Produced by Jon Farrow.Edited by Keerthi Raj.Music: 'Origami' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au----**Correction** At 5:26, the date of the earliest numerical tables is the beginning of the second millenium before the Common Era.
SHOW NOTES FOR “A CALENDAR OF GREGORIES” The bracket is back! Paul's application of March Madness oddsmaking to the name and fame of popes throughout history returns in this episode. Co-hosts Paul and Bill, after completing a tour of popes called Leo, now look at Pope Gregory, a popular name that appeared in sixteen iterations. This makes for an informative roller coaster ride through the past. This chain started out with a man actually born as Gregory. He chose to be Pope Gregory I and ruled in the Vatican in the years 590-604, but the Catholic Church has chosen to call him Gregory the Great. He did much to shape the Church of the Dark Ages and Medieval times. He was a great administrator, even helping to “orchestrate” the development of Gregorian Chant. He is a canonized saint. Gregory II reigned in 715-731. He was one of the popes dealing with warring European factions and with the rise of Islam. He is a canonized saint. Gregory III, whose term was 731-741, addressed issues such as iconoclasm, a penchant among some European Catholic factions as well as in Islam. Paul goes on to tell tales of Gregory IV (827-844) and of Gregory V (996-999), who was the first German pope, and of Gregory VI (1045-1046). This simoniac resigned a year before his death. Gregory VII (1073-1085) was born Hildebrand of Sovana. This great reformer is a canonized saint. Gregory VIII ruled for two months in 1187. Gregory IX (1227-1241) was followed by Gregory X (1271-1276) and by Gregory XI (1370-1378), who was the last French pope and the last pope to reign in Avignon as the holy see. Gregory XII (1406-1415) He was the last of the Roman line during the Western Schism (1378–1417), when the papacy was contested by antipopes in Avignon (France) and in Pisa (Italy). Gregory XIII (1572-1585) promulgated the Gregorian Calendar. Gregory XIV had a short tenure in 1590-1591. Then came Gregory XV (1621-1623). Gregory XVI (1831-1846) presided over debates on how to handle the future of the papal states, and he supported traditional monarchies in Europe, says Britannica. He was the last pope named Gregory. The classic papal name Gregory provides a throughline for viewing immense change between the secular and the sacred, spanning conflict and continuity in the first and second millennia of the Common Era. The calendar changed, but the Church is still here. Photo: Unidentified, San Gregorio Magno, 18th century, carved and painted wood, 27 1⁄2 x 9 5⁄8 x 9 1⁄4 in. (69.8 x 24.5 x 23.6 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Teodoro Vidal Collection, 1996.91.58A-B
ALAN MULHERN: The Quest & Psychotherapy (Jungian Approach to Healing)
This episode explores the Gnostic worldview, flourishing in the first centuries of the Common Era, which offers one of religious history's most radical apocalyptic visions. It is founded on a profoundly dualistic understanding of reality: the material cosmos is a prison, and humanity is a tragic hybrid—a divine spark of light trapped in corrupt flesh and matter. The influences of Gnostic thought are traced in a succession of artists and visionaries from William Blake to D.H. Lawrence. For those who want more information on booking for the Archetypal Constellations workshop "Resourcing Our Future", led by Richard Olivier, here is the link: https://www.wholepartnership.com/booking/resourcing-our-future-a-masterclass-on-archetypal-constellations-with-richard-olivier/
Between the year 63 before the Common Era, and the year 136 of the Common Era, the Jewish people waged three revolts against the mightiest empire in the world. In retrospect, we can see that these were not only local uprisings, but civilizational confrontations that would echo through history—struggles that pitted the Jewish people's fierce determination to live as a free nation in their ancestral homeland against Rome's inexorable drive to impose order across its vast dominions. What makes these revolts so fascinating is not merely their military drama, but the profound questions they raise about how different civilizations remember and interpret the same events. Recall the way that Rome understood its purpose and its mission, the grand aspirations that fueled Rome's rise and Rome's bloodstained greatness. As Vergil puts it in the Book VI of the Aeneid (in John Dryden's poetic rendering): But, Rome, 't is thine alone, with awful sway, To rule mankind, and make the world obey, Disposing peace and war by thy own majestic way; To tame the proud, the fetter'd slave to free: These are imperial arts, and worthy thee. When Roman historians recorded these conflicts in Judea, they saw rebellious subjects disrupting the peace that Rome had brought to the world. They saw the Jews as ingrates and troublemakers, who refused to appreciate the benefits of imperial rule. But when Jewish historians look back on this period they tend to see something altogether different: a tragic tale of national resistance—a struggle for freedom—to defend the honor of God, His people, and His land. These competing narratives reveal something essential about the nature of historical memory, and the separate moral universes of these rival civilizational traditions. To illuminate and explain this conflict, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver speaks with Barry Strauss, formerly a longtime professor of classics at Cornell University, and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His forthcoming book is Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World's Mightiest Empire, to which he brings deep expertise in Roman military history, and also a keen appreciation for the strategic dimensions of these conflicts.
This week, we're going back way back to a time before the Common Era, when the world's relationship with mind-altering substances was just getting started. Our hosts are handed 5 wild facts about ancient drug use… but not all of them are true.Did the philosopher Pliny really drop knowledge on herbal highs? Was cannabis actually a war tactic in ancient China? And did someone really write the first-ever how-to guide on drug use thousands of years before Wikipedia?Tune in as our hosts debate, deduce, and occasionally derail into ancient weirdness, all in the pursuit of truth (or at least a strong guess).Can you separate the truth from the trip?
Joseph and Aseneth: A Study in Manuscript Transmission (de Gruyter, 2025) expands a few verses from the book of Genesis into a novella-length work. It is increasingly used as a source for Judaism and Christianity at the turn of the Common Era. Scholarly attention has largely focused the work's provenance, the priority of a longer or shorter text version, and the implications for interpretation. But few have engaged with the work's manuscript witness and transmission. This study returns to the sources. It considers how the redaction and translation of Joseph and Aseneth affected its interpretation, and looks at the interests of the redactors and copyists. Its findings warn against placing too much weight on details that lack such an importance in the manuscript tradition. Important contributions made in this monograph include: a detailed study of the two earliest versions, the Syriac and Armenian translations; focus on the Greek manuscripts of the three longest families (f, Mc, a); analysis of four abridged versions (family d, E, Latin 1 and so-called "early modern Greek"); the first available synoptic edition of the Greek versions of the story, including the first edition of manuscript E. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
Joseph and Aseneth: A Study in Manuscript Transmission (de Gruyter, 2025) expands a few verses from the book of Genesis into a novella-length work. It is increasingly used as a source for Judaism and Christianity at the turn of the Common Era. Scholarly attention has largely focused the work's provenance, the priority of a longer or shorter text version, and the implications for interpretation. But few have engaged with the work's manuscript witness and transmission. This study returns to the sources. It considers how the redaction and translation of Joseph and Aseneth affected its interpretation, and looks at the interests of the redactors and copyists. Its findings warn against placing too much weight on details that lack such an importance in the manuscript tradition. Important contributions made in this monograph include: a detailed study of the two earliest versions, the Syriac and Armenian translations; focus on the Greek manuscripts of the three longest families (f, Mc, a); analysis of four abridged versions (family d, E, Latin 1 and so-called "early modern Greek"); the first available synoptic edition of the Greek versions of the story, including the first edition of manuscript E. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies
Joseph and Aseneth: A Study in Manuscript Transmission (de Gruyter, 2025) expands a few verses from the book of Genesis into a novella-length work. It is increasingly used as a source for Judaism and Christianity at the turn of the Common Era. Scholarly attention has largely focused the work's provenance, the priority of a longer or shorter text version, and the implications for interpretation. But few have engaged with the work's manuscript witness and transmission. This study returns to the sources. It considers how the redaction and translation of Joseph and Aseneth affected its interpretation, and looks at the interests of the redactors and copyists. Its findings warn against placing too much weight on details that lack such an importance in the manuscript tradition. Important contributions made in this monograph include: a detailed study of the two earliest versions, the Syriac and Armenian translations; focus on the Greek manuscripts of the three longest families (f, Mc, a); analysis of four abridged versions (family d, E, Latin 1 and so-called "early modern Greek"); the first available synoptic edition of the Greek versions of the story, including the first edition of manuscript E. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
Joseph and Aseneth: A Study in Manuscript Transmission (de Gruyter, 2025) expands a few verses from the book of Genesis into a novella-length work. It is increasingly used as a source for Judaism and Christianity at the turn of the Common Era. Scholarly attention has largely focused the work's provenance, the priority of a longer or shorter text version, and the implications for interpretation. But few have engaged with the work's manuscript witness and transmission. This study returns to the sources. It considers how the redaction and translation of Joseph and Aseneth affected its interpretation, and looks at the interests of the redactors and copyists. Its findings warn against placing too much weight on details that lack such an importance in the manuscript tradition. Important contributions made in this monograph include: a detailed study of the two earliest versions, the Syriac and Armenian translations; focus on the Greek manuscripts of the three longest families (f, Mc, a); analysis of four abridged versions (family d, E, Latin 1 and so-called "early modern Greek"); the first available synoptic edition of the Greek versions of the story, including the first edition of manuscript E. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies
Joseph and Aseneth: A Study in Manuscript Transmission (de Gruyter, 2025) expands a few verses from the book of Genesis into a novella-length work. It is increasingly used as a source for Judaism and Christianity at the turn of the Common Era. Scholarly attention has largely focused the work's provenance, the priority of a longer or shorter text version, and the implications for interpretation. But few have engaged with the work's manuscript witness and transmission. This study returns to the sources. It considers how the redaction and translation of Joseph and Aseneth affected its interpretation, and looks at the interests of the redactors and copyists. Its findings warn against placing too much weight on details that lack such an importance in the manuscript tradition. Important contributions made in this monograph include: a detailed study of the two earliest versions, the Syriac and Armenian translations; focus on the Greek manuscripts of the three longest families (f, Mc, a); analysis of four abridged versions (family d, E, Latin 1 and so-called "early modern Greek"); the first available synoptic edition of the Greek versions of the story, including the first edition of manuscript E. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies
How does oak aging change wine and whisky flavour, colour and texture? What do glass, gears, and automatons have to do with the invention of distillation? Why is yeast such an essential tool in scientific research and wine production, especially in the face of climate change? In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I'm chatting with Adam Rogers, author of the New York Times bestseller Proof: The Science of Booze. You can find the wines we discussed at https://www.nataliemaclean.com/winepicks Giveaway One of you is going to win a copy of his terrific new book, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. To qualify, all you have to do is email me at natalie@nataliemaclean.com and let me know that you've posted a review of the podcast. I'll choose one person randomly from those who contact me. Good luck! Highlights What are some of the traits that new yeasts are being developed for? Why does sugar deserve the title of most important molecule in the world? How is human saliva used in the production of Chicha, one of the oldest types of alcoholic beverage? What is microbial terroir and how does it affect the flavour profile of fermented drinks? Why does Adam describe distillation as the apotheosis of human life on Earth? How does the process of distillation work? What is the most important thing we can learn from the alchemists? Is the shape of a distillation still important to the process? What's happening to spirits while they're aging in barrels? Have there been successful innovations to age wine and spirits more quickly? Why do some people lose their sense of smell after a concussion? Key Takeaways When you're drinking whisky, and it's that beautiful amber color, that's all from the wood. It's completely clear when it goes into a barrel and it's brown when it comes out. So color is part of what changes, and all those flavours. In the process of aging, as the temperature goes up and down, the pores in the wood open and close. As they open, the liquid gets drawn into that layer inside of the wood, and then gets pushed back out. So there's this kind of back-and-forth process, which is why so many of the experimental attempts to accelerate the aging process use heat to try to cycle it faster. Distillation was developed in the first two to 300 years of the Common Era. People were starting to transform naturally occurring phenomena into a technology that could exist in a temple or in the home. Distillation is one of those technologies, along with a lot of automatons and the simple machines, gears, screws and the steam engines. Yeasts are a workhorse organism in laboratories because it's very easy to change their traits and genetics. They share DNA with each other, and when they grow, they mutate very quickly. Generation to generation change. So you can use classic animal or microbial husbandry techniques to change them as well. This can become especially important as climate change changes the regions that are important to wine. About Adam Rogers Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, where he writes about technology, culture, and the ways they overlap. Prior to joining BI, Adam was a longtime editor and writer at WIRED, where his article “The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress” was the second-most-read thing on the entire internet in 2015. Adam's WIRED feature story on a mysterious fungus that grows on whisky warehouses won a AAAS/Kavli science journalism award — and led to his 2014 New York Times bestseller Proof: The Science of Booze. Adam is also the author of the 2021 book Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. He has also written for Alta, the Atlantic, National Geographic, the New York Times, Slate, and Smithsonian, and may be the only journalist to attend both San Diego Comic-Con and the White House Correspondents Dinner. To learn more, visit https://www.nataliemaclean.com/331.
This episode we continue to follow the monk Xuanzang on his path along the silk road. From Gaochang, he traveled through the Tarim Basin, up over the Tianshan Mountains, to the heart of the Western Gokturk Qaghanate. From there, he traveled south, through the region of Transoxania to Bactria and the land of Tukhara. He pushed on into the Hindu Kush, witnessing the stone Buddha statues of Bamiyan, and eventually made his way to the land of Kapisa, near modern Kabul, Afghanistan. From there he would prepare to enter the Indian subcontinent: the home of the historical Buddha. For more discussion and some photos of the areas along this journey, check out our podcast blog at https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-121 Rough Transcript Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is Episode 121: Journey to the West, Part 2 The cold winds blew through the travelers' doubled up clothing and thick furs. Cold, wet ground meant that even two sets of boots were not necessarily enough after several days. The frozen mist would often obscure everything except for the path immediately in front, hiding the peaks and making the sky a uniform white. In many places, the path would be blocked by rock, ice, or snow—the remnants of an avalanche, which could easily take an unsuspecting traveler. And there was the elevation. Hiking through the mountains, it was easy enough to reach heights of a mile or higher, and for those not accustomed to that elevation the thin air could take a surprising toll, especially if you were pushing yourself. And the road was no less kind to the animals that would be hauling said travelers and their gear. And yet, this was the path that Xuanzang had agreed to. He would continue to push through, despite the various deprivations that he would be subjected to. No doubt he often wondered if it was worth it. Then again, returning was just as dangerous a trip, so why not push on? Last episode we introduced the monk Xuanzang, who traveled the Silk Road to India in the 7th century and returned to China. He brought back numerous sutras to translate, and ended up founding a new school, known as the Faxian school—or the Hossou school in Japan. As we mentioned last time, Xuanzang during his lifetime met with students from the archipelago when they visited the continent. The records of his travels—including his biography and travelogue—are some of the best information we have on what life was like on the silk road around this time. In the last episode, we talked about Xuanzang: how he set out on his travels, his illegal departure from the Tang empire, and his perilous journey across the desert, ending up in Gaochang. There, King Qu Wentai had tried to get him to stay, but he was determined to head out. This episode we are going to cover his trip to Agni, Kucha, and Baluka—modern Aksu—and up to the Western Gokturk Qaghanate's capital of Suyab. From there, we'll follow his footsteps through the Turkic controlled regions of Transoxania and into Tukhara, in modern Afghanistan. Finally, we'll cover the last parts of his journey before he reached the start of his goal: India. From Gaochang, Xuanzang continued on, through the towns he names as Wuban and Dujin, and into the country of Agni—known today as the area of Yanqi—which may also have been known as Wuqi. The route was well-enough known, but it wasn't necessarily safe. At one point, Xuanzang's caravan met with bandits, whom they were fortunately able to pay off. The following night they encamped on a river bank with some merchants who also happened to be traveling the road. The merchants, though, got up at midnight and headed out, hoping to get to the city early so that they could be the first ones to the market. They only made it a few miles down the road, however, before they encountered more bandits, who slaughtered them and took their goods. The following day, Xuanzang and his retinue came upon the merchants' remains lying in the road and saw the aftermath of the massacre. This was an unforgiving land, and the road was truly dangerous, even for those who traveled it regularly. And yet Xuanzang was planning to travel its entire length until he reached India. So with little alternative, they carried on to the royal city of Agni. Agni, or Yanqi, sits on the southwestern edge of the basin, west of Bositeng lake, on the border between the Turfan basin and the larger Tarim Basin. The name is thought to be a Tocharian—or Turfanian—name for the city, which is also known as Karashr. According to the biography by Huili, Xuanzang and his party didn't stay long in Agni. Apparently Agni and Gaochang were not exactly on friendly terms, and even though the King of Agni and his ministers reportedly came out to greet Xuanzang and welcome him to their city, they refused to provide any horses. They spent a single night and moved on. That said, Agni still made an impression on Xuanzang. He noted how the capital was surrounded by hills on four sides, making it naturally defensible. As for the people, he praises them as honest and straightforward. They wore clothing of felt and hemp cloth, and cut their hair short, without hats or any kind of headwear. Even the climate was pleasant, at least for the short time he was there. He also notes that they used a script based on India—likely referring to the Brahmic script, which we find in the Tarim basin. However, as for the local lord, the King of Agni, he is a little less charitable. Xuanzang claimed he was brave but “lacked resourcefulness” and he was a bit of a braggart. Furthermore, the country had “no guiding principles or discipline and government orders are imperfect and not seriously implemented.” He also mentioned the state of Buddhism in the country, noting that they were followers of Sarvastivada school, a Theravada sect popular along the Silk Road at the time. Xuanzang was apparently not too pleased with the fact that they were not strict vegetarians, including the “three kinds of pure meat”. From Agni, Xuanzang continued southwest, heading for the kingdom of Kucha. He seems to have bypassed the nearby kingdom of Korla, south of Agni, and headed some 60 or 70 miles, climbing over a ridge and crossing two large rivers, and then proceeding another 200 miles or so to the land of Kucha. Kucha was a kingdom with over one hundred monasteries and five thousand monks following a form of Theravada Buddhism. Here, Xuanzang was welcomed in by the king, Suvarnadeva, described as having red hair and blue eyes. While Xuanzang was staying in Kucha, it is suspected that he probably visited the nearby Kizil grotto and the Buddhist caves, there, which include a painting of King Suvarnadeva's father, King Suvarnapuspa, and his three sons. You can still visit Kucha and the Kizil grottos today, although getting there is quite a trek, to be sure. The ancient Kuchean capital is mostly ruins, but in the Kizil caves, protected from the outside elements, you can find vivid paintings ranging from roughly the 4th to the 8th century, when the site was abandoned. Hundreds of caves were painted, and many still demonstrate vibrant colors. The arid conditions protect them from mold and mildew, while the cave itself reduces the natural bleaching effect of sunlight. The paintings are in numerous styles, and were commissioned by various individuals and groups over the years. They also give us some inkling of how vibrant the city and similar structures must have been, back when the Kuchean kingdom was in its heyday. The people of Kucha are still something of a mystery. We know that at least some of them spoke an Indo-European language, related to a language found in Agni, and both of these languages are often called Tocharian, which we discussed last episode. Xuanzang himself noted that they used Indian writing, possibly referring to the Brahmi script, or perhaps the fact that they seem to have used Sanskrit for official purposes, such as the inscription on the cave painting at Kizil giving the name of King Suvarnapuspa. The Kucheans also were clothed in ornamental garments of silk and embroidery. They kept their hair cut, wearing a flowing covering over their heads—and we see some of that in the paintings. Xuanzang also notes that though we may think of this area as a desert, it was a place where rice and grains, as well as fruit like grapes, pomegranates, plums, pears, peaches, and almonds were grown. Even today, modern Xinjiang grows some absolutely fantastic fruit, including grapes, which are often dried into raisins. Another point of interest for Xuanzang may have been that Kucha is known as the hometown of none other than Kumarajiva. We first mentioned Kumarajiva back in episode 84. Kumarajiva was one of the first people we know of who translated many of the sutras from India that were then more widely disseminated throughout the Yellow River and Yangzi river basins. His father was from India and his mother was a Kuchean princess. In the middle of the 4th century, when he was still quite young, he traveled to India and back with his mother on a Buddhist pilgrimage. Later he would start a massive translation project in Chang'an. His translations are credited with revolutionizing Chinese Buddhism. Xuanzang was initially welcomed by the king, his ministers, and the revered monk, Moksagupta. They were accompanied by several thousand monks who set up tents outside the eastern gate, with portable Buddha images, which they worshipped, and then Xuanzang was taken to monastery after monastery until sunset. At one of the monasteries, in the southeast of the city, there were several tens of monks who originally came from Gaochang, and since Xuanzang had come from there, they invited him to stay with them. The next day he met and feasted with the King, politely declining any meat, and then went to the monastery in the northwest to meet with the famous monk: Moksagupta. Moksagupta himself had made the journey to India, and had spent 20 years there himself. It seems like this would have been the perfect person for Xuanzang to talk to about his plans, but instead, the two butted heads. Moksagupta seems to have seen Xuanzang's Mahayana faith as heretical. He saw no reason for Xuanzang to travel all the way to India when he had all the sutras that anyone needed there in Kucha, along with Moksagupta himself. Xuanzang's response seems to have been the Tang dynasty Buddhist version of “Okay, Boomer”, and then he went ahead and tore apart Moksagupta's understanding of his own sutras—or so Xuanzang relayed to his biographers. We don't exactly have Moksagupta's side, and, let's face it, Xuanzang and his biographers are not necessarily reliable narrators. After all, they followed Mahayana teachings, which they considered the “Greater Vehicle”, and they referred to the Theravada teachings as the “Hinayana” or “Lesser Vehicle”. Meanwhile, Theravada Buddhists likely saw many of the Mahayana texts as extraneous, even heretical, not believing them to actually be the teachings of the Buddha. It must have been winter time, as the passes through the mountains on the road ahead were still closed, and so Xuanzang stayed in Kucha, spending his time sightseeing and meeting with various people. He even went back to see Moksagupta, but the older monk shunned him, and would get up and exit the room rather than engaging with him, so they had no more conversations. Eventually, Xuanzang continued on his way west, following along the northern rim of the Tarim basin. Two days out from Kucha, disaster struck. Some two thousand or so Turkish bandits suddenly appeared—I doubt Xuanzang was counting, so it may have been more or less. I imagine that memories of what had happened to the merchants near Agni must have gone through Xuanzang's mind. Fortunately, for him, they were fighting over loot that they had pillaged from various travelers, and since they couldn't share it equally, they fell to fighting each other and eventually dispersed. He travelled for almost 200 miles after that, stopping only for a night at the Kingdom of Baluka, aka Gumo—the modern city of Aksu. This was another Theravada Buddhist kingdom. Xuanzang noted tens of Buddhist temples, and over 1000 Buddhist monks. The country was not large—about 200 miles east to west and 100 miles north to south. For reference that means it was probably comparable in size with Kyushu, in terms of overall area, or maybe the size of Denmark—excluding Greenland—or maybe the US state of Maryland. Xuanzang described the country as similar to Kucha in just about every way, including the written language and law, but the spoken language was different, though we don't get many more details. From Baluka, he crossed northward through the Tianshan mountains, which are classified as an extension of the Pamirs known as the Ice Mountains. Had he continued southwest, he would have hit Kashgar and crossed over between the Pamir and Tian Shan ranges into the Ferghana valley, but instead he turned north. We don't know exactly why he took this perilous option, but the route that may have been popular at the time as it was one of the most direct routes to the seat of the Western Gokturk Empire, which he was currently traveling through. The Tian Shan mountains were a dangerous journey. Avalanches could block the road—or worse. Xuanzang describes the permanent ice fields—indeed, it is the ice fields and glaciers of the Tian Shan that melt in the summer and provide the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin with water, even to this day. In Xuanzang's day, those glaciers were likely even more prevalent than today, especially as they have been recorded as rapidly disappearing since 1961. And where you weren't on snow and ice, the ground was probably wet and damp from the melt. To keep warm, you would wear shoes over your shoes, along with heavy fur coats, all designed to reduce exposure. Xuanzang claims that 3 or 4 of every 10 people didn't survive the crossing—and that horses and oxen fared even worse. Even if these numbers are an exaggeration, the message is clear: This was a dangerous journey. After about seven days, Xuanzang came out of the mountains to the “Great Pure Lake”, the “Da Qing Hai”, also known as the Hot Sea or the Salt Sea, which likely refers to Issyk Kul. The salt content, along with the great volume of water it possesses, means that the lake rarely freezes over, which is likely why it is seen as “hot” since it doesn't freeze when the fresh water nearby does. This lake is the second largest mountain lake in the world, and the second deepest saltwater lake. Traveling past the lake, he continued to Suyab, near modern Tokmok, in Kyrgyzstan, just west of the modern capital of Bishkek. This was an old Sogdian settlement, and had since become the capital of the Western Gokturks. Sogdians—like Xuanzang's guide, Vandak—were integral to the Gokturk kingdom. Their language was the lingua franca of the Silk Road, and at the time of the Gokturk Khaganate, it was also the official court language, and so when Xuanzang appeared at the court of the Great Khagan of the Western Gokturks, it was likely the language of diplomacy. When we think of Turkic people, many in the English speaking world think of Turkiye, and perhaps of the mighty Ottoman empire. Some may think of Turkmenistan, Kazhakstan, Kyrgyzstan, or Uzbekistan, among others. And of course, there are the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. All of these people claim roots in the ancestral Turkic homeland in the Altai mountains, which sit largely in western Mongolia, north of China's Xinjiang region. Much like the Xiongnu and the Mongols, they were pastoral nomads, moving their herds across the steppes, often covering great distances. They would regularly move through different regions, perhaps returning each season, though sometimes not returning for years at a time. They were often seen as barbarians by settled people living in cities, and yet their goods and horses were highly prized. Nomad and sedentary lifestyles would often collide. Farmers would turn pastureland into fields, and when the nomadic people returned on their circuits, they would find walls and fences where there was once open land, and the people there would claim to “own” the land, a concept often foreign to people who were always on the move. Nomadic people, such as the Gokturks, were not necessarily keeping vast libraries of records about themselves and their histories, and so much of what we get comes from external sources, which do not always have incredibly reliable narrators. To many of the settled agriculturalists, groups like the Turks were marauders who raided their villages and farms. They were a great bogeyman of the steppes, which required the firm hand of strong defenses to keep out—or so their opponents would want people to think. While they were known for their warfare, which incorporated their mobility, but they were keenly interested in trade, as well. They understood the value of the trade routes and the various cities and states that they included in their empire. Thus, the Sogdians and the Gokturks seem a natural fit: the Sogdians were more settled, but not entirely so, as demonstrated by their vast trade networks. And the Sogdians also were part of the greater central Eurasian steppe culture, so the two cultures understood each other, to a degree. They are even depicted similarly in art, with slight differences, such as long hair that was often associated with Turks over the Sogdians. In some areas of the Gokturk empire, Sogdians would run the cities, while the Gokturks provided military aid and protection. Xuanzang's description of the people of Suyab, or the “City of Suye River”, doesn't pick out anyone in particular, and he even says that it was a place where traders of the Hu, or foreign, tribes from different countries mingle their abodes. He mentions the people here as being called Suli, which is also the name given to the language—this may refer to “Sogdian” in general. They write with an alphabet that is written vertically rather than horizontally—this may refer to a few scripts that were written this way, possibly based off Syriac or Aramaic alphabets that were adapted to Sogdian and other Iranian languages, but it isn't clear. We are told that the people dressed in felt and hemp clothing, with fur and “cotton” garments. Their clothes fit tightly, and they kept their hair cut short, exposing the top of their heads—though sometimes they shaved it completely, tying a colored silk band around the forehead. He goes on to describe these people as greedy liars, possibly a reference to the mercantile nature of many of the people at the time. Something to note: The Turks of this time had not yet encountered Islam, which was just now starting to rise up in the Middle East. The Prophet Muhammad is said to have been born around the end of the 6th century CE and was preaching in the early 7th century, though his teachings would begin to spread outward soon enough. But that means that the Gokturks were not an Islamic empire. Rather, their own traditions seem to have focused on the worship of Tengri, an Altaic personification of the universe, often simplified as a “sky god”. Tengrism can be found amongst the Xiongnu, Mongols, and others, and it was the national religion of the Gokturks themselves, but there were many who also adopted other religions that they encountered, including Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Manichaeism, and Buddhism. In fact, Xuanzang notes that the Turks he met in Suyab would not sleep or sit on beds made of wood because wood was thought to contain the spirit of fire, which he says they worshipped. That sounds similar to Zoroastrian beliefs, where fire is associated with Ahura Mazda, who is also worshipped as a sky god. These may have been beliefs inherited from their Eastern Iranian Sogdian partners. In Xuanzang's biography, we are given more details about his visit to Suyab. Apparently, as he was headed to the city, he met a hunting party, which we are told was the retinue of Yehu Khan. Hunting was an important part of life on the steppes, and it continued to be a favorite sport of the Gokturk nobility. Yehu Khan—possibly Yagbhu Khan, though that is up for some debate—is described as being dressed in a green silk robe, with his hair exposed, and wearing a turban of white silk about ten feet long that wrapped his forehead and hung behind his back. His “hunting” expedition wasn't just a couple of the guys. It included about 200 officials, all with plaited hair and dressed in brocade robes—they weren't exactly out there roughing it. He also had his soldiers, dressed in furs, felt, or fine woolen clothes, and there were so many cavalry that they stretched out of sight. The Khan seemed pleased to meet Xuanzang, but his hunt was expected to last another couple of days, at least, so he sent an attendant named Dharmaja to take Xuanzang back to wait for the Khan to return. Three days later, Xuanzang was given an audience. The khan was seated in a large yurt. Xuanzang noted the seeming incongruity between the khan, sitting there in the tent, decorated with golden flowers, with the officials dressed in magnificent brocade garments sitting in two long rows in front of him and the armed guards behind him, compared to the simple felt walls of the tent. A ”yurt” is a common feature of nomadic life on the steppes. It wasn't exactly a single person operation to haul them around, but they can be taken down and put up with relative ease. And while yurts could be relatively simple, there are examples of much more elaborate structures. There is little reason they couldn't be made larger, perhaps with some extra support. In later centuries, there are examples of giant yurts that seem like real construction projects. Use of tents, even in a city, where they had permanent palace buildings, was likely a means of retaining the nomadic steppe traditions, even while enjoying the benefits of city life. Whom exactly Xuanzang met with is a matter of debate. His records seem to indicate that it was Tong Yabghu Qaghan of the Western Gokturk Khaganate, but other sources say that Tong Yabghu Qaghan died in 628, and the earliest Xuanzang could have been meeting with him was 630, two years later, so if that is the case, he must have met with Tong Yabghu's son, Si Yabghu Qaghan. It is likely that Xuanzang, who was dictating his accounts years after, mentioned the Qaghan and then, when they looked up who it was, they simply made a mistake. Remember, Xuanzang would have had everything translated through one or two languages. He did know what he saw, however, and he recounted what he remembered. Tong Yabghu Qaghan oversaw the height of the Gokturk Qaghanate, and appears to have favored the Buddhist religion, though there were many different religions active in their territories at the time. They oversaw an extremely cosmopolitan empire covering huge swaths of central Eurasia, including the lucrative silk road. Xuanzang notes that at the court there were individuals from Gaochang and even a messenger from the Han—which is to say the Tang Empire. One wonders if Xuanzang—or anyone at that time—realized just how tenuous the Khan'sposition was. After Tong Yabghu's death, the Qaghanate would decline, and less than a decade later it would fall to the Tang dynasty, who took Suyab and made it their western outpost. In fact, Suyab is thought to have been the birthplace, over a century later, of a young boy who would find a love of poetry. That boy's name was Li Bai, or Ri Haku, in Japanese. He would become one of the most famous poets in Chinese history, and his poems were even known and studied in Japan. And it was largely through Japanese study of Li Bai's poems that his works came to the English speaking world: first through Ernest Fenollosa, who had studied in Japan, and then by the celebrated Ezra Pound, who had used Ernest's notes to help with his own translations of the poems. This was, though, as I said, over a century after Xuanzang's journey. At the time of our story, the Qaghan was throwing a feast, including Xuanzang and all of the foreign envoys. Xuanzang comments on the food and drink—his hosts provided grape juice in lieu of wine, and cooked a special vegetarian feast just for him, while the other guests ate a feast of meat, such as veal, lamb, fish, and the like. There was also the music of various regions along the Silk Road, which Xuanzang found to be catchy, but of course not as refined as the music he was used to, of course. After dinner Xuanzang was asked to expound upon the Darma, largely about the basic principle that you should be kind to one another—I doubt he was getting into the deep mysteries of Buddhist philosophy. Xuanzang stuck around the court for three more days, during which time the Qaghan tried to get him to stay, but Xuanzang insisted that he had to make it to India. And so the Qaghan relented. He found men in his army who could translate for Xuanzang along his journey, and had letters of introduction written to at least as far as the state of Kapisa, in modern Afghanistan. And so, armed with the Qaghan's blessing and a fresh translator, Xuanzang struck out again. They headed westward for over one hundred miles, eventually reaching Bingyul, aka the Thousand Springs. This is the area where the Qaghan and his court would spend his summers, and the deer in the area were protected under his orders, so that they were not afraid of humans—which sounds similar to the situation with the deer in Nara. Continuing on another fifty miles or so—the distances are approximate as Xuanzang's primary duty was not exactly to map all of this out—Xuanzang arrived at the city of Taras, in modern Kazakhstan, another place where the cultures of the Silk Road mixed and mingled. Xuanzang didn't have much to say about Taraz, apparently, though it is one of the oldest cities in Transoxania, founded near the beginning of the Common Era. A few miles south of there, Xuanzang reportedly found a village of re-settled ethnic Han that had been captured by the Gokturks and settled here. They had adopted the dress and customs of the Turkic people, but continued to speak a version of Chinese. Southwest of that he reached the City of White Water, likely referring to Aksukent. This is the same “Aksu” as the city in Xinjiang, both of which mean “White Water” in Turkic, but this one is in the south of Kazakhstan. Xuanzang found the climate and products an improvement over what he had experienced in Taras. Beyond that, he next arrived at the city of Gongyu, and then south again to Nujkend, and then traveling westward to the country of Chach, aka Tashkent. Both Nujkend and Chach were large cities in nations of smaller, mostly autonomous city-states, which made up a lot of the political geography of Transoxania. I would note that Xuanzang's notes here are much more sparse than previously. This may be because these were outside of the Tarim basin and therefore of less interest to individuals in the Tang empire. Or perhaps he was just making his way more quickly and not stopping at every kingdom along the way. From Tashkent, he continued southeast to the Ferghana valley—the country of Feihan. Oddly, this country doesn't appear in Xuanzang's biography, even though the Ferghana Valley seems to have been fairly well known back in the Tang Empire—it was known as the home of some of the best horses, which were one of its first major exports. In fact, the Han dynasty even mounted a military expedition to travel to Ferghana just to obtain horses. Xuanzang is oddly silent on this; however, he does talk about the fertile nature of the land. He mentions that their language here is different from the lands he had been traveling through up to this point, and also points out that the people of the Ferghana valley were also visibly different from others in the area. From the Ferghana valley, Xuanzang headed west for about 300 miles or more to the land of Sutrushana—perhaps referring to the area of Ushrusana, with its capital of Bunjikat. This country was also largely Sogdian, and described as similar to Tashkent. From there, he traveled west through a great desert, passing skeletons, which were the only marker of the trail other than a view of the far off mountains. Finally, they reached Samarkand, known as the country of “Kang” in Chinese, which was also the term used to mark Sogdians who claimed descent from the people of Samarkand. Samarkand is another of the ancient cities of Central Asia, and even today is the third largest city in modern Uzbekistan. Human activity in the region goes back to the paleolithic era, and the city was probably founded between the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. Samarkand was conquered by Alexander the Great, and during the Achaemenid Empire it was the capital of Sogdiana. During Xuanzang's visit, Samarkand was described as an impenetrable fortress with a large population. For all of his travel, Samarkand was the first place Xuanzang notes as specifically not a Buddhist land. In fact, there were two monasteries, suggesting that there had been Buddhists, but if any monks tried to stay there then the locals would chase them out with fire. Instead, they worshipped fire—likely meaning Ahura Mazda and Zoroastrianism. This leads to a story that I have to wonder about, given the reliability of our narrators. It is said that Xuanzang was met by the King with arrogance, but after staying the night Xuanzang was able to tell the King about Buddhism and its merits. The king was intrigued, and asked to observe the Precepts, and treated Xuanzang with hospitality and respect. So when two of Xuanzang's attendants went to the monasteries to worship, they were chased out with fire. When the king heard about this, he had the people arrested and ordered their hands to be cut off. Xuanzang could not bear to witness such suffering, however, and he intervened to have them spared. So instead the king had them flogged and banished from the city. Ever since then, all the people believed in Buddhism. Some parts of this strike true. It was likely that the king would entertain this strange wanderer who had arrived with letters from the great Qaghan—that may have even explained why Xuanzang had been encouraged to make the dangerous journey to Suyab in the first place, so that he could obtain such permission. And it would not be strange for the king to listen to his teachings. If Xuanzang's attendants were attacked, that would have been a huge breach of hospitality, and however the King felt about it, he no doubt had to do something about it. And so all of that sounds somewhat believable. Does that mean everyone suddenly converted to Buddhism? I don't know that I'm quite willing to go that far. It is also likely that there were Buddhists there already, even if the majority religion was Zoroastrianism. From Samarkand, Xuanzang traveled farther southwest, to the country of Kasanna, which seems to have been the edge of what we might call Sogdiana. According to his biographers, however, there was a little more to all of this. Rather, he headed west to Kusanika. Then he traveled to Khargan, and further on to the country of Bukhara, and then to Vadi. All of these were “An” in Chinese, which was the name element used for Sogdians from this region. He then continued west to the country of Horismika, on the other side of the Amu Darya, aka the Oxus River of Transoxanian fame. From there he traveled further southwest, entering into the mountains. The path here was often such that they had to travel single-file, and there was no food or water other than what you brought with you. Eventually they came to a set of doors, known as the Iron Gate. This was a Turkic fortress. It was no doubt fortuitous that he had come from his meeting with the Qaghan, and likely had permission to pass through. From there, they entered the country of Tukhara. As we noted in Episode 119, Tukhara was in the region of Bactria. It was bordered by the Pamir range in the east, and the Persian empire in the west. There were also the Great Snow Mountains in the south, likely referencing the Hindu Kush. Tukhara had been conquered by the Gokturks just within the past couple of decades, and Xuanzang notes that the country had been split into largely autonomous city-states as the local royalty had died without an heir many years before. With the Gokturk conquest, it was now administered by Tardu Shad, the son of Tong Yabghu Qaghan. “Shad” in this case was a local title. Here, Xuanzang's narrative gets a little dicey, especially between his biography and his records. The records of the Western Regions denotes various countries in this area. It is unclear if he traveled to all of them or is just recounting them from records he obtained. He does give us at least an overview of the people and the region. I would also note that this is one of the regions he visited, again, on his return trip, and so may have been more familiar with the region than those areas he had passed through from Suyab on down. For one thing, he notes that the language of the region was different from that of the “Suli”, which appears to refer to the Sogdians. This was the old territory of the Kushan empire, and they largely spoke Bactrian. Like Sogdian, it was another Eastern Iranian language, and they used an alphabet based largely on Greek, and written horizontally rather than vertically. They also had their own coins. This region had plenty of Buddhist communities, and Xuanzang describes the cities and how many monasteries they had, though, again, it isn't clear if he actually visited all of them or not. These are countries that Li Rongji translates as “Tirmidh”, “Sahaaniyan”, “Kharuun”, “Shuumaan”, etc. It does seem that Xuanzang made it to the capital city, the modern city Kunduz, Afghanistan. Xuanzang actually had something specific for the local Gokturk ruler, Tardu Shad. Tardu Shad's wife was the younger sister of King Qu Wentai of Gaochang, whom we met last episode. Qu Wentai had provided Xuanzang a letter for his younger sister and her husband. Unfortunately, Xuanzang arrived to learn that the princess of Gaochang had passed away, and Tardu Shad's health was failing. It does seem that Tardu Shad was aware of Xuanzang, however—a letter had already come from Qu Wentai to let them know that Xuanzang was on his way. As I mentioned last episode, letters were an important part of how communities stayed tied together. Of course, given the perils of the road, one assumes that multiple letters likely had to be sent just in case they didn't make it. The US Postal Service this was not. Tardu Shad, though not feeling well, granted an interview with Xuanzang. He suggested that Xuanzang should stick around. Then, once the Shad had recovered from his illness, he would accompany Xuanzang personally on his trip to India. Unfortunately, that was not to be. While Xuanzang was staying there, he was witness to deadly drama. Tardu Shad was recovering, which was attributed to the recitations by an Indian monk who was also there. This outcome was not exactly what some in the court had wanted. One of the Shad's own sons, known as the Tagin prince, plotted with the Shad's current wife, the young Khatun, and she poisoned her husband. With the Shad dead, the throne might have gone to the son of the Gaochang princess, but he was still too young. As such, the Tagin Prince was able to usurp the throne himself, and he married his stepmother, the young Khatun. The funeral services for the late Tardu Shad meant that Xuanzang was obliged to stay at Ghor for over a month. During that time, Xuanzang had a seemingly pleasant interaction with an Indian monk. And when he finally got ready to go, he asked the new Shad for a guide and horses. He agreed, but also made the suggestion that Xuanzang should then head to Balkh. This may have meant a bit of backtracking, but the Shad suggested that it would be worth it, as Balkh had a flourishing Buddhist community. Fortunately, there was a group of Buddhist monks from Balkh who happened to be in Kunduz to express their condolences at the passing of Tardu Shad, and they agreed to accompany Xuanzang back to their hometown, lest he end up getting lost and taking the long way there. The city of Balkh is also known as “Baktra”, as in “Bactria”, another name of this region. A settlement has been there since at least 500 BCE , and it was already an important city when it was captured by Alexander the Great. It sits at the confluence of several major trade routes, which no doubt were a big part of its success. Xuanzang's biography notes that it was a massive city, though it was relatively sparsely populated—probably due to the relatively recent conquest by the Gokturks, which had occurred in the last couple of decades. That said, there were still thousands of monks residing at a hundred monasteries in and around the city. They are all characterized as monks of Theravada schools. Southwest of the city was a monastery known as Navasamgharama, aka Nava Vihara, or “New Monastery”. Despite its name, the monastery may have actually been much older, going back to the Kushan emperor Kaniska, in the 2nd century CE. Ruins identified as this “New Monastery” are still visible south of Balkh, today. The monastery is described as being beautifully decorated, and it seems that it had a relic—one of the Buddha's teeth. There are also various utensils that the Buddha is said to have used, as well. The objects would be displayed on festival days. North of the monastery there was a stupa more than 200 feet in height. South of the monastery was a hermitage. Each monk who studied there and passed away would have a stupa erected for them, as well. Xuanzang notes that there were at around 700 memorial stupas, such that they had to be crammed together, base to base. It was here that Xuanzang met a young monk named Prajnaakara, who was already somewhat famous in India, and well-studied. When questioned about certain aspects of Buddhism, Xuanzang was impressed by the monk's answers, and so stayed there a month studying with the young monk. Eventually, Xuanzang was ready to continue on his journey. He departed Balkh towards the south, accompanying the teacher Prajnakara, and together they entered the Great Snow Mountains, aka the Hindu Kush. This path was even more dangerous than the trip through the Tian Shan mountains to Suyab. They eventually left the territory of Tukhara and arrived at Bamiyan. Bamiyan was a kingdom in the Hindu Kush, themselves an extension of the Himalayan Mountain range. It Is largely based around valley, home to the modern city of Bamyan, Afghanistan, which sits along the divide between Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Today it is a major center for individuals of the Hazara ethnic group, one of the main ethnic groups in Afghanistan, which is a multi-ethnic state that includes, today, the Pashtun, Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek people, along with a number of smaller ethnic groups. Today they largely reside in the mountainous areas of the Hindu Kush. Bamiyan made an impact on our protagonist. Their language was slightly different from that in Tukhara, but using the same—or similar enough—writing system. Buddhism was thriving in the capital, and we are told of a rock statue of the standing Buddha, over a hundred feet in height, along with a copper statue of the standing Buddha nearby. There was also another reclining Buddha a mile or two down the road. There were multiple monasteries with thousands of monks, and the ruler of that kingdom received Xuanzang well. Xuanzang wasn't the first monk to travel to Bamiyan from the Middle Kingdom—in this he was, perhaps unwittingly, on the trail of the monk Faxian. Faxian likely did not see these statues, though, as we believe they were built in the 6th and early 7th century—at least the stone Buddha statues. They were a famous worship site until February 2001, when the Taliban gave an order to destroy all of the statues in Afghanistan. Despite this, they were inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003. Fortunately, we have images from before their destruction. These statues were a blend of Greco-Buddhist and Gandharan art styles—appropriate as it stands between the Hellenistic area of Tukhara and the ancient region of Gandhara—including the modern city of Kandahar and into the Indus Valley region of Pakistan. Continuing east through the mountains, Xuanzang eventually came out at the kingdom of Kapisa. This may have had its capital around modern-day Bagram, north of modern Kabul, but the country seems to have been quite large. Kapisa over saw some tens of other countries, and it is thought that at one time its influence extended from Bamyan and Kandahar to the area of modern Jalalabad. Their language was even more different than that of Tukhara, but they were still using the same writing system. The king of Kapisa is said to have been of Suli ethnicity—which would seem to indicate that he was Sogdian, or at least descended from people of the Transoxanian region. Xuanzang notes that the ruler, as rough and fiery as he is described—as a true warlord or similar—he nonetheless made a silver image of the Buddha, eighteen feet in height, every year. He also gave charity to the poor and needy in an assembly that was called every five years. There were over one hundred monasteries and some 6000 monks, per Xuanzang's recollection, and notably, they were largely following Mahayana teachings. For the most part the monks that Xuanzang had encountered on this journey were Theravada—Xuanzang refers to them as “Hinayana”, referring to the “Lesser Vehicle” in contrast to Xuanzang's own “Mahayana”, or “Greater Vehicle”. “Theravada” refers to the “way of the elders” and while Mahayana Buddhism largely accepts the sutras of Theravada Buddhism, there are many Mahayana texts that Theravada Buddhists do not believe are canonical. We discussed this back in Episode 84. There was apparently a story of another individual from the Yellow River being sent as a hostage to Kapisa when it was part of the Kushan Empire, under Kanishka or similar. Xuanzang recounts various places that the hostage, described as a prince, lived or visited while in the region. Xuanzang's arrival likely stirred the imagination of people who likely knew that the Tang were out there, but it was such a seemingly impossible distance for most people. And yet here was someone who had traveled across all of that distance. One of the monasteries that claimed to have been founded because of that ancient Han prince invited Xuanzang to stay with them. Although it was a Theravada monastery, Xuanzang took them up on the offer, both because of the connection to someone who may have been his countryman, but also because of his traveling companion, Prajnakara, who was also a Theravada monk, and may not be comfortable staying at a Mahayana monastery. Xuanzang spends a good deal of ink on the stories of how various monasteries and other sites were founded in Kapisa and the surrounding areas. He must have spent some time there to accumulate all of this information. It is also one of the places where he seems to have hit at least twice—once on the way to India, and once during his return journey. The King of Kapisa is said to have been a devotee of Mahayana Buddhism. He invited Xuanzang and Prajnakara to come to a Mahayana monastery to hold a Dharma gathering. There they met with several leading figures in the monastery, and they discussed different theories. This gathering lasted five days, and at the end, the king offered Xuanzang and the other monks five bolts of pure brocade and various other gifts. Soon thereafter, the monk Prajnakara was invited back to Tukhara, and so he and Xuanzang parted ways. And it was about time for Xuanzang to continue onwards as well. From Kapisa, he would travel across the “Black Range” and into Lampaka. This may refer to the area of Laghman or Jalalabad. Today, this is in modern Afghanistan, but for Xuanzang, this would have been the northwestern edge of India. He was almost there. And so are we, but we'll save his trip into India for next episode. Until then thank you for listening and for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, please tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts. If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page. You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com. Thank you, also, to Ellen for their work editing the podcast. And that's all for now. Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.
This podcast script explores the development of angelology in Jewish literature before the Common Era. It examines the roles and functions of prominent angels, including Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. These angels' roles evolved from divine messengers to figures with specific cosmic responsibilities and veneration within ancient communities. The script highlights their individual attributes and significance as protectors, messengers, healers, and guides, and considers the influence of these figures on early Christian thought regarding divine mediators. It also touches on lesser-known angels like Yahoel and Eremiel and their roles as mediator and overseer of judgement, respectively. for more in depth teachings www.twinsbiblicalacademy.com
Did Rajaraja Chola, who built the world-renowned Brihadisvara temple in Tanjore, and Suryavarman II of Kambuja Desa (Cambodia), who built the world's largest temple complex, Angkor Wat, erect these enduring marvels with a magic wand? Surely not. How did they nurture prosperity? What were the economic models that enabled them to leave the world awestruck? Sriram Balasubramanian's sequel to the pathbreaking Kautilyanomics answers these questions by examining Common Era empires and kingdoms ranging from the Cholas, Pallavas, Pandyas and Vijayanagara to Southeast Asian kingdoms. Balasubramanian audaciously puts forward a novel, indigenous and sustainable framework called Dharmanomics—a function of Kautilyan Dharmic capitalism, of a Dharmic ecosystem driven by temples and Sreni (corporate guilds) Dharma—that spans thousands of years. It was put into practice much before the likes of Adam Smith and modern economic thinkers. Dharmanomics seeks to present a coherent and structured economic framework based on the idea of Dharma for at least 1500 years. In the session, Sriram Balasubramanian is in conversation with Vikram Bhat. This is an excerpt from a conversation that took place in the BIC premises in November 2024. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favorite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, Audible, and Amazon Music.
In the Second Century before the Common Era, the Jewish world was in an upheaval due largely to various splinter sects, such as the Sadducees and Boethusians, causing internal conflict and confusion among the nation. The two great leaders of the Jews at the time had many challenges on their hands. In this podcast we tell […]
Send us a textFor the fiftieth (!) episode of this podcast, I'm taking a few centuries detour from the Middle Ages to talk about the fall of the Roman Republic. In this episode, the first of a two part series, my cohost Dr. Jenny Paxton and I talk about the political and cultural institutions of the Roman Republic in the late second and first centuries B.C.E.*. We explain how and why a republic designed to govern an Italian city-state fell victim to its own success as Rome rose to empire, despite all of its built in checks and balances. In the second episode, Jenny and I relate how a series of ambitious political generals--Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian Augustus--plunged the Republic into two generations of civil war that culminated in the establishment of a military autocracy disguised as a republic.(Note: B.C.E. stands for "Before the Common Era"; C.E. for "The Common Era." They are the secular equivalents of B.C. and A.D.. Be warned, we weren't consistent in our use of these dating conventions. I also noticed that sometimes we called the Roman legislative and judicial body known as the consilium plebis the plebeian assembly and sometimes the council of plebeians. Sorry for any confusion this might cause.) This episode includes an audio clip from Universal Picture's 1993 film "Jurassic Park"Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com Intro and exit music are by Alexander NakaradaIf you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com
One hundred and two years ago, Benito organized a March on Rome with the intention of forcing the king of Italy to yield the government to him. It worked, and Benito was appointed prime minister.Thirty-two-year-old Antonio had a problem with that, and spoke out against Benito.Benito got tired of Antonio's criticism and had him thrown into prison, where he died 11 years later.But while he was still with us, he wrote 30 notebooks containing more than 3,000 pages of history and analysis. The prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci are considered by historians to be highly original contributions to 20th-century political theory.Wizard Academy vice-chancellor Dave Young brought Antonio to my attention last week when he forwarded to me a glistening quote written by this shackled young writer:“The old world is dying. And the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”Those words of Antonio Gramsci dance and sting like honeybees, don't they?In return for his gift of Antonio Gramsci, I sent Dave a couple of the enthusiastic ramblings of American scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson:“I will defend AD and BC, year of the Lord, AD, ‘Ano Domini,' and BC, ‘Before Christ.' I'll defend the use of those because a lot of hard work went into creating that calendar – the Gregorian calendar – which is now used worldwide. It's based on a Christian construct, but it had a lot of very interesting science that went in behind it.I'm not just going to ‘swap out' the words to dereligify it. I don't mind leaving credit where it's due.I don't know any atheist that still uses AD and BC. They use ‘Common Era,' CE, and BCE, ‘Before Common Era.'But who are they fooling? It's the same numbers of years. They're just trying to ‘paint over' a religious reference.I don't have that much objection to the religious participation in civilization.”But this next comment of Neil deGrasse Tyson serves as a sort of counterbalance to that first one:“Ben Franklin was the world's most famous scientist in his day. But he's not remembered in America as that; he's remembered as a founding father.He invented the lightning rod.What's the tallest structure back then? The steeple makes the church the tallest structure in any city. What is the most susceptible to a lightning strike? The tallest structure. So lightning was taking out churches left and right, and if you were the other church that wasn't taken out, you had good argument for saying the people in the church that burned down were worshiping in the wrong way.Ben Franklin then invents the lightning rod, which does two things: It dissipates charges that build up under your structure that would otherwise be part of the lightning strike, and it sends them back into the air without the benefit of lightning. So that makes you less susceptible to begin with. And if the lightning strikes it, then it directs all of the charge through the metal and not through your house.So Ben Franklin does this, and churches are no longer destroyed by lightning, even if they're hit, and he's accused of heresy for thwarting the will of God.”Neil deGrasse Tyson is famous for his atheism but he vigorously defends the use of the Christian system of dating the history of the world in years that count backward and forward from the day that Jesus was born.Benjamin Franklin doubted the divinity of Jesus, but he invented the lightning rod to make sure that churches did not burn down. And they accused him of heresy for it.*As I consider articulate Antonio and bumbling Benito of Italy, I recall the words of a delightful American writer who was born in the same year Antonio was born. When she was accused of being too critical, the delightful Dorothy Parker responded:“How could I possibly overthrow the government when I can't even keep my dog down?”Me...
David Benjamin Blower is a musician, poet, podcaster and theologian who you may have encountered on the Nomad podcast, his Messianic Folklore podcast or the Common Era podcast (described as 'conversations between a Catholic Priest and a post-evangelical poet'). With all that in mind, it was very kind of him to join us on Beer Christianity and we liked him very much. On this episode, David talks to us about art and being an artist, deconstruction and why he wouldn't describe his own journey using that term, as well as anarchism and a little theology. Jonty also gets to fangirl a little about a particular Benjamin Blower song and find out what kind of space David creates to write. Join us ofr a fascinating, thoughtful meander through the mind of an important figure in the post-evangelical scene. You can find more of David's work at davidbenjaminblower.com Listen to David Benjamin Blower's music here! About Beer Christianity Beer Christianity is an anti-capitalist, pro-BLM, pro-LGBTQ+, anti-imperialist, post-post-post-evangelical podcast where we drink a bit and talk a lot. Our aim is to be real, helpful and entertaining. Beer Christianity also has a newsletter in which Jonty and guest authors comment on the news, theological issues and stuff that matters. He updates it according to his own wildly inconsistent neurodivergent schedule, but it's a good read. Sign up for the Beer Christianity newsletter on Substack. Support Beer Christianity… Putting the show together costs a bunch of money in hosting fees, editing software, equipment and time. If you can, please help out by donating via Buy Me a Coffee (or in our case, a beer) Follow Beer Christianity on Twitter: @beerxianity and find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and, probably, loads of other places. We love hearing from listeners. You can email us at beerchristianity AT yahoo DOT com. We often respond to mails we get on the show. And if you leave us a voicenote on Insta we might air your question on an episode. There's also a connected Show With Music on Spotify called New Old Music. Check it out if you like eclectic music and random chat. Other things… Malky's design work has graced many good magazines and music videos. You can find his stuff and even commission him if he's not too busy, here. Jonty's novel, Incredulous Moshoeshoe and the Lightning Bird, is not literature but it's quite fun if you like Supernatural, Africa or the Goth scene. Laura doesn't want us to post her BookTok until she's posted more videos. She may have prayed for the app to be banned just to avoid it. Beliefs… We don't really want to preach at you, but some people like to know what we believe. It's this: Jesus Christ is the Son of God and came to teach us a better way to be, while reconciling us to God and each other in a way we could never do without Him. He also changed water into wine. Nice.
You can now support us on Patreon via six tiers of subscription and the online shop. It really helps. In this episode, we'll talk about the Paris 2024 Games and the history of the Olympics. Transcription (straight from KLL script): What are the Olympics? Kids Learning Lab! MADE USING AUDACITY - A free, open source audio editor. Hello! Before we start this episode, I'd like to talk about Patreon. I think most of you do not know what Patreon is. Patreon is a service to help podcasts. On it, you can support Kids Learning Lab by buying a subscription. There are free and paid subscriptions. In the free one, you'll get a newsletter every episode containing bonus content. In the paid subscriptions, we have five tiers. Check them out on Patreon! You can also buy audio messages, video messages, give donations, and join the Fan Club if you are a high-paying member. Sign up today on patreon.com/kidslearninglab. Now, time for this episode. We'll talk about the Olympics. [TRANSITION] Have you heard of the Olympics? They just finished the 2024 Summer Olympics. Olympics are where you can compete in a sport to earn gold, silver, or bronze medals for your country. The country with the most medals wins. You might have heard it because of your parents, who are probably talking about the Olympics. The Olympics go waaaaaay back. The first recorded Olympics was in 776 BCE. BCE means “Before the Common Era”. It means that many years negative. For example, 776 BCE means the year -776 or you can say 776 years before the year 0. CE means “Common Era”. It means that many years positive. For example, 2024 CE means the year 2024 or you can say 2024 years after the year 0. Now that we've learned about BCE and CE, imagine how long ago 776 BCE was! The first games were in Olympia, in Europe. But in the year 393 CE, a Roman emperor shut down the Olympics because he thought they were bad. The Olympics were started again in modern times, when people wanted to compete. Now you can represent your favorite team in the Olympics! Time for some fun facts now: 1. In the Olympics, since it started in Greece, a torch is lit there and an international relay race takes place to get to the country where the Olympics is every year. 2. The Olympics is in a different place each year. This year, it was in Paris, and in 2028 it will be in Los Angeles. 3. Tug of war used to be a sport in the Olympics. 4. Art used to be in the Olympics. 5. Until 1912, the Olympics used to hand out full gold medals, made of actual gold! They soon realized it was too expensive, and now the medals are just dipped in gold, and made of metal. 6. Hot air ballooning was a sport! 7. In 776 BCE, the Olympics used to hand out olive-branch crowns instead of medals. That was a fun episode! I hope you enjoyed it! Remember, you can always support us on Patreon, even if it's a free subscription! Paid subscriptions help to support us more, and give you bonus content exclusively for you! Plus, in some tiers, you can get discounts and free items from the online shop. [PIXEL TRANSITION/SOUND EFFECT]
Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton UP, 2024) sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during the first three centuries of the Common Era. In this beautifully written book, Anna Bonnell Freidin asks how inhabitants of the Roman Empire—especially women and girls—understood their bodies and constructed communities of care to mitigate and make sense of the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing on medical texts, legal documents, poetry, amulets, funerary art, and more, she shows how these communities were deeply human yet never just human. Freidin demonstrates how patients and caregivers took their place alongside divine and material agencies to guard against the risks inherent to childbearing. She vividly illustrates how these efforts and vital networks offer a new window onto Romans' anxieties about order, hierarchy, and the individual's place in the empire and cosmos. Unearthing a risky world that is both familiar and not our own, Birthing Romans reveals how mistakes, misfortunes, and interventions in childbearing were seen to have far-reaching consequences, reverberating across generations and altering the course of people's lives, their family histories, and even the fate of an empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton UP, 2024) sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during the first three centuries of the Common Era. In this beautifully written book, Anna Bonnell Freidin asks how inhabitants of the Roman Empire—especially women and girls—understood their bodies and constructed communities of care to mitigate and make sense of the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing on medical texts, legal documents, poetry, amulets, funerary art, and more, she shows how these communities were deeply human yet never just human. Freidin demonstrates how patients and caregivers took their place alongside divine and material agencies to guard against the risks inherent to childbearing. She vividly illustrates how these efforts and vital networks offer a new window onto Romans' anxieties about order, hierarchy, and the individual's place in the empire and cosmos. Unearthing a risky world that is both familiar and not our own, Birthing Romans reveals how mistakes, misfortunes, and interventions in childbearing were seen to have far-reaching consequences, reverberating across generations and altering the course of people's lives, their family histories, and even the fate of an empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton UP, 2024) sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during the first three centuries of the Common Era. In this beautifully written book, Anna Bonnell Freidin asks how inhabitants of the Roman Empire—especially women and girls—understood their bodies and constructed communities of care to mitigate and make sense of the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing on medical texts, legal documents, poetry, amulets, funerary art, and more, she shows how these communities were deeply human yet never just human. Freidin demonstrates how patients and caregivers took their place alongside divine and material agencies to guard against the risks inherent to childbearing. She vividly illustrates how these efforts and vital networks offer a new window onto Romans' anxieties about order, hierarchy, and the individual's place in the empire and cosmos. Unearthing a risky world that is both familiar and not our own, Birthing Romans reveals how mistakes, misfortunes, and interventions in childbearing were seen to have far-reaching consequences, reverberating across generations and altering the course of people's lives, their family histories, and even the fate of an empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine
Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton UP, 2024) sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during the first three centuries of the Common Era. In this beautifully written book, Anna Bonnell Freidin asks how inhabitants of the Roman Empire—especially women and girls—understood their bodies and constructed communities of care to mitigate and make sense of the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing on medical texts, legal documents, poetry, amulets, funerary art, and more, she shows how these communities were deeply human yet never just human. Freidin demonstrates how patients and caregivers took their place alongside divine and material agencies to guard against the risks inherent to childbearing. She vividly illustrates how these efforts and vital networks offer a new window onto Romans' anxieties about order, hierarchy, and the individual's place in the empire and cosmos. Unearthing a risky world that is both familiar and not our own, Birthing Romans reveals how mistakes, misfortunes, and interventions in childbearing were seen to have far-reaching consequences, reverberating across generations and altering the course of people's lives, their family histories, and even the fate of an empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton UP, 2024) sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during the first three centuries of the Common Era. In this beautifully written book, Anna Bonnell Freidin asks how inhabitants of the Roman Empire—especially women and girls—understood their bodies and constructed communities of care to mitigate and make sense of the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing on medical texts, legal documents, poetry, amulets, funerary art, and more, she shows how these communities were deeply human yet never just human. Freidin demonstrates how patients and caregivers took their place alongside divine and material agencies to guard against the risks inherent to childbearing. She vividly illustrates how these efforts and vital networks offer a new window onto Romans' anxieties about order, hierarchy, and the individual's place in the empire and cosmos. Unearthing a risky world that is both familiar and not our own, Birthing Romans reveals how mistakes, misfortunes, and interventions in childbearing were seen to have far-reaching consequences, reverberating across generations and altering the course of people's lives, their family histories, and even the fate of an empire.
Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton UP, 2024) sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during the first three centuries of the Common Era. In this beautifully written book, Anna Bonnell Freidin asks how inhabitants of the Roman Empire—especially women and girls—understood their bodies and constructed communities of care to mitigate and make sense of the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing on medical texts, legal documents, poetry, amulets, funerary art, and more, she shows how these communities were deeply human yet never just human. Freidin demonstrates how patients and caregivers took their place alongside divine and material agencies to guard against the risks inherent to childbearing. She vividly illustrates how these efforts and vital networks offer a new window onto Romans' anxieties about order, hierarchy, and the individual's place in the empire and cosmos. Unearthing a risky world that is both familiar and not our own, Birthing Romans reveals how mistakes, misfortunes, and interventions in childbearing were seen to have far-reaching consequences, reverberating across generations and altering the course of people's lives, their family histories, and even the fate of an empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton UP, 2024) sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during the first three centuries of the Common Era. In this beautifully written book, Anna Bonnell Freidin asks how inhabitants of the Roman Empire—especially women and girls—understood their bodies and constructed communities of care to mitigate and make sense of the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing on medical texts, legal documents, poetry, amulets, funerary art, and more, she shows how these communities were deeply human yet never just human. Freidin demonstrates how patients and caregivers took their place alongside divine and material agencies to guard against the risks inherent to childbearing. She vividly illustrates how these efforts and vital networks offer a new window onto Romans' anxieties about order, hierarchy, and the individual's place in the empire and cosmos. Unearthing a risky world that is both familiar and not our own, Birthing Romans reveals how mistakes, misfortunes, and interventions in childbearing were seen to have far-reaching consequences, reverberating across generations and altering the course of people's lives, their family histories, and even the fate of an empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/italian-studies
Anti-Jewish sentiment might be the world's longest hatred. Historical documents suggest Jews have experienced this hatred for over 2,000 years, well before the Common Era even began. It would continue through various eras, including the Roman Era, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust. And it continues today. Hate crimes against Jews have gone up by 400% in the US compared to last year. So many questions arise, including the obvious: why are Jews so hated and what can we do to help? Jewish hatred confuses me deeply. Jews are a people who comprise about 0.2% of the world's population, yet they have been at the forefront of major social justice movements and scientific breakthroughs. Jews show up consistently to lend a hand in repairing the world in disproportionately high numbers considering they comprise only a fraction of a percent of the population. In this episode, you'll hear two Jewish psychologists discussing anti-Jewish sentiment, misunderstandings that lead to antisemitism, and myths and truths. It is my hope that people can walk away with a better understanding of why this is a misplaced hatred. And, of course, we discuss what we can do to support Jewish people. My colleague, Dr. Liya Levanda (https://www.drlevanda.com/) is a psychologist and educator who specializes in teaching others about Jewish issues like antisemitism. As you'll hear, she's thoughtful and very well-informed. So, listen in as Liya talks with me about supporting Jews through antisemitism.
J.J. and Dr. Shai Secunda set Talmudic discourse ablaze. They put the Talmud in its Zoroastrian and Sasanian context, and have bloody good discussion about how Judaism interacted with its socio-religious environment in the first few centuries of the Common Era. Don't forget to rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice!Please send any complaints or compliments to podcasts@torahinmotion.orgFor more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsDr. Secunda is a religious studies scholar who has taught at universities in Israel and the United States, including the Hebrew University and Yale University, where he was the Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellow. He previously served as a member of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and lecturer in the university's comparative religion and Hebrew literature departments. His academic interests range from rabbinic and Middle Persian literature to classical Jewish history, the Babylonian Talmud in its Sasanian context, Zoroastrianism, and critical approaches to the study of religion, including gender and religion.Professor Secunda is the author of The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context (2014) and The Talmud's Red Fence: Menstruation and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and Its Sasanian Context (forthcoming with Oxford University Press); and editor of Shoshannat Yaakov: Jewish and Iranian Studies in Honor of Yaakov Elman (with Steven Fine, 2012) and Encounters by the Rivers of Babylon: Scholarly Conversations between Jews, Iranians, and Babylonians in Antiquity (with Uri Gabbay, 2014). He has also contributed book chapters to the Wiley-Blackwell History of Jews and Judaism, and Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism. He is a member of the Association of Jewish Studies and the International Society of Iranian Studies. Professor Secunda has taught at Bard since 2016.
"Different Heart" by Belong from Common Era; "Drift" by Kasbo from The Learning of Urgency; "Take You Some Time" by Shit and Shine from You Were Very High; "The Seal" by Beak> from >>>>; "Cycle" by Koichi Shimizu from Imprint; "Stream of the River Quantum" by Wave Temples from Portals; "Capumcap" by Nightmares on Wax from Carboot Soul (Deluxe Edition); "The Return" by SQRL from Music from Man Ray; "The Top of Thomas Street" by Mary Lattimore and Walt McClements from Rain on the Road; "Radiator" by Bill Mackay from Locust Land; "Lemurian Tsunami Inside a Hat" by Acid Mother Reynolds from Volume 3.
Join me on a ride home while I rip a coupla zingers.
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Supervolcanoes tail risk has been exaggerated?, published by Vasco Grilo on March 6, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is a linkpost for the peer-reviewed article "Severe Global Cooling After Volcanic Super-Eruptions? The Answer Hinges on Unknown Aerosol Size" ( McGraw 2024). Below are its abstract, my notes, my estimation of a nearterm annual extinction risk from supervolcanoes of 3.38*10^-14, and a brief discussion of it. At the end, I have a table comparing my extinction risk estimates with Toby Ord's existential risk guesses given in The Precipice. Abstract Here is the abstract from McGraw 2024 (emphasis mine): Volcanic super-eruptions have been theorized to cause severe global cooling, with the 74 kya Toba eruption purported to have driven humanity to near-extinction. However, this eruption left little physical evidence of its severity and models diverge greatly on the magnitude of post-eruption cooling. A key factor controlling the super-eruption climate response is the size of volcanic sulfate aerosol, a quantity that left no physical record and is poorly constrained by models. Here we show that this knowledge gap severely limits confidence in model-based estimates of super-volcanic cooling, and accounts for much of the disagreement among prior studies. By simulating super-eruptions over a range of aerosol sizes, we obtain global mean responses varying from extreme cooling all the way to the previously unexplored scenario of widespread warming. We also use an interactive aerosol model to evaluate the scaling between injected sulfur mass and aerosol size. Combining our model results with the available paleoclimate constraints applicable to large eruptions, we estimate that global volcanic cooling is unlikely to exceed 1.5°C no matter how massive the stratospheric injection. Super-eruptions, we conclude, may be incapable of altering global temperatures substantially more than the largest Common Era eruptions. This lack of exceptional cooling could explain why no single super-eruption event has resulted in firm evidence of widespread catastrophe for humans or ecosystems. My notes I have no expertise in volcanology, but I found McGraw 2024 to be quite rigorous. In particular, they are able to use their model to replicate the more pessimistic results of past studies tweeking just 2 input parameters (highlighted by me below): "We next evaluate if the assessed aerosol size spread is the likely cause of disagreement among past studies with interactive aerosol models. For this task, we interpolated the peak surface temperature responses from our ModelE simulations to the injected mass and peak global mean aerosol size from several recent interactive aerosol model simulations of large eruptions (Fig. 7, left panel). Accounting for these two values alone (left panel), our model experiments are able to reproduce remarkably similar peak temperature responses as the original studies found". By "reproduce remarkably well", they are referring to a coefficient of determination (R^2) of 0.87 (see Fig. 7). "By comparison, if only the injected masses of the prior studies are used, the peak surface temperature responses cannot be reproduced". By this, they are referring to an R^2 ranging from -1.82 to -0.04[1] (see Fig. 7). They agree with past studies on the injected mass, but not on the aerosol size[2]. Fig. 3a (see below) illustrates the importance of the peak mean aerosol size. The greater the size, the weaker the cooling. I think this is explained as follows: Primarily, smaller particles reflect more sunlight per mass due to having greater cross-sectional area per mass[3]. Secondarily, larger particles have less time to reflect sunlight due to falling down faster[4]. According to Fig. 2 (see below), aerosol size increases with injected mass, which makes intuitive sen...
Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! Greek & Roman Mythology Retold
THE SYMPOSIUM OF THE CAESARS. Written by the Roman emperor Julian. Translated from the ancient Greek and directed by Jeremy Swist. Recorded by Jeremy Swist and fellow cast members. Recordings engineered by Christopher Swist at Evenfall Studio in Spofford, New Hampshire, USA. Produced in loving memory of Lawrence P. Swist. Find further details on the production here. DRAMATIS PERSONAE in order of appearance: Jeremy Swist as EMPEROR JULIANLiv Albert as the EMPEROR'S COMPANIONChristopher Polt as SILENUSToph Marshall as APOLLO and HELIOSEmma Pauly as DIONYSUSMarios Koutsoukos as ZEUSAneirin Pendragon as HERMESFiona Radford as LADY JUSTICEKatherine Lu Hsu as HERACLESPeta Greenfield as ROMULUS-QUIRINUSJay Bregman as CRONUSPrincess O'Nika Auguste as POSEIDONLea Niccolai as JULIUS CAESARMeg Finlayson as ALEXANDER THE GREATDraken Garfinkel as OCTAVIAN AUGUSTUSAlberto Quiroga-Puertas as TRAJANMark Masterson as MARCUS AURELIUSCharlotte Naylor Davis as CONSTANTINEDaniel Munn as JESUS SETTINGThe imperial palace of Antioch, on a mid-December evening in the year 362 of the Common Era, the 1,115th year from the founding of Rome. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The extraterrestrial comedy podcast where we probe whether Santa Claus is evil. Is Santa an evil alien? This one dates back to before the Common Era and is evidenced in the Bible itself (Jeremiah 7:31, Leviticus 18:21 and Isaiah 63: 2-3). We move from the Bible to modern pop music as we outline a trail of evil hidden in plain sight. Every time Santa did bad and was noticed, Santa changed their name and moved on! Amidst that, we reflect on Christmas past. Alongside this, it is asked… Is Stranger Things worth watching? Mr Moonwalker has yet to confirm that he's watched Squid Game, either (just saying). Can children sense true evil, before they are corrupted by the world? All that and more on this week's file. But more importantly, Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals! #probe Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/butitwasaliens Store: https://butitwasaliens.co.uk/shop/ Probe us: Email: butitwasaliens@gmail.com Instagram/Threads @ ButItWasAliens Twitter @ ButItWasAliens Facebook: @ ButItWasAliens - join Extraterrestrial Towers Music: Music created via Garageband. Additional music via: https://freepd.com - thank you most kindly good people. As we got pagan you may have heard the ‘Legend of Hyrule' theme from 1998's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64 composed by Kōji Kondō. We closed out with the 'Staff Roll' aka credits theme from Nintendo's 1990-1992 Super Mario World from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, another song composed by Hero of Sound Kōji Kondō. Sources: Britannica history of Santa Claus: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Santa-Claus Article by R.K. Troughton: https://amazingstories.com/2014/12/santa-claus-alien/ Richard Idemudia Inegbedion's fascinating Make We Talk Now article: https://makewetalknow.com/2022/12/24/the-dark-history-of-santa-claus-and-why-christians-shouldnt-celebrate-christmas/
Cub Kuker Supernatural Podcast EP351 Today I want to talk about what we have all been missing when it comes to interpreting, reading, and practicing scripture and lives. Unfortunately, we all have a tendency to look for a dogmatic “this is this” and “that is that” doctrine when the actual power of scripture may be hidden within the ancient Gnostic scriptures, and the esoteric view they hold within. The Gnostic Scriptures "The Hymn of the Pearl" and "The Acts of Thomas," are part of a collection of ancient religious texts that fall under the umbrella of Gnosticism. Gnosticism is a diverse set of religious and spiritual beliefs that emerged in the early centuries of the Common Era. It encompasses a variety of sects and teachings, characterized by the belief in special knowledge (gnosis) that leads to salvation. The Hymn of the Pearl - Context: The Hymn of the Pearl is a poetic and symbolic narrative found within the Acts of Thomas, an apocryphal work associated with Gnostic Christianity. - Symbolism: The hymn tells the story of a prince who descends into the material world, forgets his royal origin, and becomes entangled in earthly affairs. Eventually, he remembers his true identity and undertakes a journey to reclaim a valuable pearl, which symbolizes spiritual knowledge or enlightenment. - Meaning: The narrative is often interpreted allegorically, representing the soul's journey into the material realm, its forgetfulness of its divine origin, and the quest for self-discovery and reunification with the divine. - Gnostic Influence: The text reflects Gnostic themes, emphasizing the importance of knowledge and spiritual insight. It also includes elements of asceticism and an emphasis on the divine within. It's important to note that Gnostic texts were often rejected by mainstream Christian groups, and many Gnostic sects faced persecution. The Nag Hammadi library, discovered in Egypt in 1945, contained a significant number of Gnostic texts, contributing to modern scholars' understanding of Gnostic beliefs and practices. These texts provide valuable insights into the diverse religious landscape of the early centuries of the Common Era and the various theological perspectives that existed within the broader Christian tradition. What do you think of this text? × NOTE: My interpretations are purely my creative and theoretical opinion. Always do your own research in regard to any theory. × I Explore Supernatural Mythōs. Unlock More As A Member! ↘️
-- Finches Diversify in Decades, Opals Form in Months, Man's Genetic Diversity in 200 Generations, C-14 Everywhere: Real Science Radio hosts Bob Enyart and Fred Williams present their classic program that led to the audience-favorites rsr.org/list-shows! See below and hear on today's radio program our list of Not So Old and Not So Slow Things! From opals forming in months to man's genetic diversity in 200 generations, and with carbon 14 everywhere it's not supposed to be (including in diamonds and dinosaur bones!), scientific observations fill the guys' most traditional list challenging those who claim that the earth is billions of years old. Many of these scientific finds demand a re-evaluation of supposed million and billion-year ages. * Finches Adapt in 17 Years, Not 2.3 Million: Charles Darwin's finches are claimed to have taken 2,300,000 years to diversify from an initial species blown onto the Galapagos Islands. Yet individuals from a single finch species on a U.S. Bird Reservation in the Pacific were introduced to a group of small islands 300 miles away and in at most 17 years, like Darwin's finches, they had diversified their beaks, related muscles, and behavior to fill various ecological niches. Hear about this also at rsr.org/spetner. * Opals Can Form in "A Few Months" And Don't Need 100,000 Years: A leading authority on opals, Allan W. Eckert, observed that, "scientific papers and textbooks have told that the process of opal formation requires tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands... Not true." A 2011 peer-reviewed paper in a geology journal from Australia, where almost all the world's opal is found, reported on the: "new timetable for opal formation involving weeks to a few months and not the hundreds of thousands of years envisaged by the conventional weathering model." (And apparently, per a 2019 report from Entomology Today, opals can even form around insects!) More knowledgeable scientists resist the uncritical, group-think insistence on false super-slow formation rates (as also for manganese nodules, gold veins, stone, petroleum, canyons and gullies, and even guts, all below). Regarding opals, Darwinian bias led geologists to long ignore possible quick action, as from microbes, as a possible explanation for these mineraloids. For both in nature and in the lab, opals form rapidly, not even in 10,000 years, but in weeks. See this also from creationists by a geologist, a paleobiochemist, and a nuclear chemist. * Finches Speciate in Two Generations vs Two Million Years for Darwin's Birds? Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands are said to have diversified into 14 species over a period of two million years. But in 2017 the journal Science reported a newcomer to the Island which within two generations spawned a reproductively isolated new species. In another instance as documented by Lee Spetner, a hundred birds of the same finch species introduced to an island cluster a 1,000 kilometers from Galapagos diversified into species with the typical variations in beak sizes, etc. "If this diversification occurred in less than seventeen years," Dr. Spetner asks, "why did Darwin's Galapagos finches [as claimed by evolutionists] have to take two million years?" * Blue Eyes Originated Not So Long Ago: Not a million years ago, nor a hundred thousand years ago, but based on a peer-reviewed paper in Human Genetics, a press release at Science Daily reports that, "research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today." * Adding the Entire Universe to our List of Not So Old Things? Based on March 2019 findings from Hubble, Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and his co-authors in the Astrophysical Journal estimate that the universe is about a billion years younger than previously thought! Then in September 2019 in the journal Science, the age dropped precipitiously to as low as 11.4 billion years! Of course, these measurements also further squeeze the canonical story of the big bang chronology with its many already existing problems including the insufficient time to "evolve" distant mature galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, enormous black holes, filaments, bubbles, walls, and other superstructures. So, even though the latest estimates are still absurdly too old (Google: big bang predictions, and click on the #1 ranked article, or just go on over there to rsr.org/bb), regardless, we thought we'd plop the whole universe down on our List of Not So Old Things! * After the Soft Tissue Discoveries, NOW Dino DNA: When a North Carolina State University paleontologist took the Tyrannosaurus Rex photos to the right of original biological material, that led to the 2016 discovery of dinosaur DNA, So far researchers have also recovered dinosaur blood vessels, collagen, osteocytes, hemoglobin, red blood cells, and various proteins. As of May 2018, twenty-six scientific journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, PLoS One, Bone, and Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, have confirmed the discovery of biomaterial fossils from many dinosaurs! Organisms including T. Rex, hadrosaur, titanosaur, triceratops, Lufengosaur, mosasaur, and Archaeopteryx, and many others dated, allegedly, even hundreds of millions of years old, have yielded their endogenous, still-soft biological material. See the web's most complete listing of 100+ journal papers (screenshot, left) announcing these discoveries at bflist.rsr.org and see it in layman's terms at rsr.org/soft. * Rapid Stalactites, Stalagmites, Etc.: A construction worker in 1954 left a lemonade bottle in one of Australia's famous Jenolan Caves. By 2011 it had been naturally transformed into a stalagmite (below, right). Increasing scientific knowledge is arguing for rapid cave formation (see below, Nat'l Park Service shrinks Carlsbad Caverns formation estimates from 260M years, to 10M, to 2M, to it "depends"). Likewise, examples are growing of rapid formations with typical chemical make-up (see bottle, left) of classic stalactites and stalagmites including:- in Nat'l Geo the Carlsbad Caverns stalagmite that rapidly covered a bat - the tunnel stalagmites at Tennessee's Raccoon Mountain - hundreds of stalactites beneath the Lincoln Memorial - those near Gladfelter Hall at Philadelphia's Temple University (send photos to Bob@rsr.org) - hundreds of stalactites at Australia's zinc mine at Mt. Isa. - and those beneath Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance. * Most Human Mutations Arose in 200 Generations: From Adam until Real Science Radio, in only 200 generations! The journal Nature reports The Recent Origin of Most Human Protein-coding Variants. As summarized by geneticist co-author Joshua Akey, "Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so" (the same number previously published by biblical creationists). Another 2012 paper, in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Eugenie Scott's own field) on High mitochondrial mutation rates, shows that one mitochondrial DNA mutation occurs every other generation, which, as creationists point out, indicates that mtEve would have lived about 200 generations ago. That's not so old! * National Geographic's Not-So-Old Hard-Rock Canyon at Mount St. Helens: As our List of Not So Old Things (this web page) reveals, by a kneejerk reaction evolutionary scientists assign ages of tens or hundreds of thousands of years (or at least just long enough to contradict Moses' chronology in Genesis.) However, with closer study, routinely, more and more old ages get revised downward to fit the world's growing scientific knowledge. So the trend is not that more information lengthens ages, but rather, as data replaces guesswork, ages tend to shrink until they are consistent with the young-earth biblical timeframe. Consistent with this observation, the May 2000 issue of National Geographic quotes the U.S. Forest Service's scientist at Mount St. Helens, Peter Frenzen, describing the canyon on the north side of the volcano. "You'd expect a hard-rock canyon to be thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old. But this was cut in less than a decade." And as for the volcano itself, while again, the kneejerk reaction of old-earthers would be to claim that most geologic features are hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, the atheistic National Geographic magazine acknowledges from the evidence that Mount St. Helens, the volcanic mount, is only about 4,000 years old! See below and more at rsr.org/mount-st-helens. * Mount St. Helens Dome Ten Years Old not 1.7 Million: Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, Mass., using potassium-argon and other radiometric techniques claims the rock sample they dated, from the volcano's dome, solidified somewhere between 340,000 and 2.8 million years ago. However photographic evidence and historical reports document the dome's formation during the 1980s, just ten years prior to the samples being collected. With the age of this rock known, radiometric dating therefore gets the age 99.99999% wrong. * Devils Hole Pupfish Isolated Not for 13,000 Years But for 100: Secular scientists default to knee-jerk, older-than-Bible-age dates. However, a tiny Mojave desert fish is having none of it. Rather than having been genetically isolated from other fish for 13,000 years (which would make this small school of fish older than the Earth itself), according to a paper in the journal Nature, actual measurements of mutation rates indicate that the genetic diversity of these Pupfish could have been generated in about 100 years, give or take a few. * Polystrates like Spines and Rare Schools of Fossilized Jellyfish: Previously, seven sedimentary layers in Wisconsin had been described as taking a million years to form. And because jellyfish have no skeleton, as Charles Darwin pointed out, it is rare to find them among fossils. But now, reported in the journal Geology, a school of jellyfish fossils have been found throughout those same seven layers. So, polystrate fossils that condense the time of strata deposition from eons to hours or months, include: - Jellyfish in central Wisconsin were not deposited and fossilized over a million years but during a single event quick enough to trap a whole school. (This fossil school, therefore, taken as a unit forms a polystrate fossil.) Examples are everywhere that falsify the claims of strata deposition over millions of years. - Countless trilobites buried in astounding three dimensionality around the world are meticulously recovered from limestone, much of which is claimed to have been deposited very slowly. Contrariwise, because these specimens were buried rapidly in quickly laid down sediments, they show no evidence of greater erosion on their upper parts as compared to their lower parts.- The delicacy of radiating spine polystrates, like tadpole and jellyfish fossils, especially clearly demonstrate the rapidity of such strata deposition. - A second school of jellyfish, even though they rarely fossilized, exists in another locale with jellyfish fossils in multiple layers, in Australia's Brockman Iron Formation, constraining there too the rate of strata deposition. By the way, jellyfish are an example of evolution's big squeeze. Like galaxies evolving too quickly, galaxy clusters, and even human feet (which, like Mummy DNA, challenge the Out of Africa paradigm), jellyfish have gotten into the act squeezing evolution's timeline, here by 200 million years when they were found in strata allegedly a half-a-billion years old. Other examples, ironically referred to as Medusoid Problematica, are even found in pre-Cambrian strata. - 171 tadpoles of the same species buried in diatoms. - Leaves buried vertically through single-celled diatoms powerfully refute the claimed super-slow deposition of diatomaceous rock. - Many fossils, including a Mesosaur, have been buried in multiple "varve" layers, which are claimed to be annual depositions, yet they show no erosional patterns that would indicate gradual burial (as they claim, absurdly, over even thousands of years). - A single whale skeleton preserved in California in dozens of layers of diatom deposits thus forming a polystrate fossil. - 40 whales buried in the desert in Chile. "What's really interesting is that this didn't just happen once," said Smithsonian evolutionist Dr. Nick Pyenson. It happened four times." Why's that? Because "the fossil site has at least four layers", to which Real Science Radio's Bob Enyart replies: "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha", with RSR co-host Fred Williams thoughtfully adding, "Ha ha!" * Polystrate Trees: Examples abound around the world of polystrate trees: - Yellowstone's petrified polystrate forest (with the NPS exhibit sign removed; see below) with successive layers of rootless trees demonstrating the rapid deposition of fifty layers of strata. - A similarly formed polystrate fossil forest in France demonstrating the rapid deposition of a dozen strata. - In a thousand locations including famously the Fossil Cliffs of Joggins, Nova Scotia, polystrate fossils such as trees span many strata. - These trees lack erosion: Not only should such fossils, generally speaking, not even exist, but polystrates including trees typically show no evidence of erosion increasing with height. All of this powerfully disproves the claim that the layers were deposited slowly over thousands or millions of years. In the experience of your RSR radio hosts, evolutionists commonly respond to this hard evidence with mocking. See CRSQ June 2006, ICR Impact #316, and RSR 8-11-06 at KGOV.com. * Yellowstone Petrified Trees Sign Removed: The National Park Service removed their incorrect sign (see left and more). The NPS had claimed that in dozens of different strata over a 40-square mile area, many petrified trees were still standing where they had grown. The NPS eventually removed the sign partly because those petrified trees had no root systems, which they would have had if they had grown there. Instead, the trees of this "fossil forest" have roots that are abruptly broken off two or three feet from their trunks. If these mature trees actually had been remnants of sequential forests that had grown up in strata layer on top of strata layer, 27 times on Specimen Ridge (and 50 times at Specimen Creek), such a natural history implies passage of more time than permitted by biblical chronology. So, don't trust the National Park Service on historical science because they're wrong on the age of the Earth. * Wood Petrifies Quickly: Not surprisingly, by the common evolutionary knee-jerk claim of deep time, "several researchers believe that several millions of years are necessary for the complete formation of silicified wood". Our List of Not So Old and Not So Slow Things includes the work of five Japanese scientists who proved creationist research and published their results in the peer-reviewed journal Sedimentary Geology showing that wood can and does petrify rapidly. Modern wood significantly petrified in 36 years these researchers concluded that wood buried in strata could have been petrified in "a fairly short period of time, in the order of several tens to hundreds of years." * The Scablands: The primary surface features of the Scablands, which cover thousands of square miles of eastern Washington, were long believed to have formed gradually. Yet, against the determined claims of uniformitarian geologists, there is now overwhelming evidence as presented even in a NOVA TV program that the primary features of the Scablands formed rapidly from a catastrophic breach of Lake Missoula causing a massive regional flood. Of course evolutionary geologists still argue that the landscape was formed over tens of thousands of years, now by claiming there must have been a hundred Missoula floods. However, the evidence that there was Only One Lake Missoula Flood has been powerfully reinforced by a University of Colorado Ph.D. thesis. So the Scablands itself is no longer available to old-earthers as de facto evidence for the passage of millions of years. * The Heart Mountain Detachment: in Wyoming just east of Yellowstone, this mountain did not break apart slowly by uniformitarian processes but in only about half-an-hour as widely reported including in the evolutionist LiveScience.com, "Land Speed Record: Mountain Moves 62 Miles in 30 Minutes." The evidence indicates that this mountain of rock covering 425 square miles rapidly broke into 50 pieces and slid apart over an area of more than 1,300 square miles in a biblical, not a "geological," timeframe. * "150 Million" year-old Squid Ink Not Decomposed: This still-writable ink had dehydrated but had not decomposed! The British Geological Survey's Dr. Phil Wilby, who excavated the fossil, said, "It is difficult to imagine how you can have something as soft and sloppy as an ink sac fossilised in three dimensions, still black, and inside a rock that is 150 million years old." And the Daily Mail states that, "the black ink was of exactly the same structure as that of today's version", just desiccated. And Wilby added, "Normally you would find only the hard parts like the shell and bones fossilised but... these creatures... can be dissected as if they are living animals, you can see the muscle fibres and cells. It is difficult to imagine... The structure is similar to ink from a modern squid so we can write with it..." Why is this difficult for evolutionists to imagine? Because as Dr. Carl Wieland writes, "Chemical structures 'fall apart' all by themselves over time due to the randomizing effects of molecular motion."Decades ago Bob Enyart broadcast a geology program about Mount St. Helens' catastrophic destruction of forests and the hydraulic transportation and upright deposition of trees. Later, Bob met the chief ranger from Haleakala National Park on Hawaii's island of Maui, Mark Tanaka-Sanders. The ranger agreed to correspond with his colleague at Yellowstone to urge him to have the sign removed. Thankfully, it was then removed. (See also AIG, CMI, and all the original Yellowstone exhibit photos.) Groundbreaking research conducted by creation geologist Dr. Steve Austin in Spirit Lake after Mount St. Helens eruption provided a modern-day analog to the formation of Yellowstone fossil forest. A steam blast from that volcano blew over tens of thousands of trees leaving them without attached roots. Many thousands of those trees were floating upright in Spirit Lake, and began sinking at varying rates into rapidly and sporadically deposited sediments. Once Yellowstone's successive forest interpretation was falsified (though like with junk DNA, it's too big to fail, so many atheists and others still cling to it), the erroneous sign was removed. * Asiatic vs. European Honeybees: These two populations of bees have been separated supposedly for seven million years. A researcher decided to put the two together to see what would happen. What we should have here is a failure to communicate that would have resulted after their "language" evolved over millions of years. However, European and Asiatic honeybees are still able to communicate, putting into doubt the evolutionary claim that they were separated over "geologic periods." For more, see the Public Library of Science, Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees. (Oh yeah, and why don't fossils of poorly-formed honeycombs exist, from the millions of years before the bees and natural selection finally got the design right? Ha! Because they don't exist! :) Nautiloid proves rapid limestone formation. * Remember the Nautiloids: In the Grand Canyon there is a limestone layer averaging seven feet thick that runs the 277 miles of the canyon (and beyond) that covers hundreds of square miles and contains an average of one nautiloid fossil per square meter. Along with many other dead creatures in this one particular layer, 15% of these nautiloids were killed and then fossilized standing on their heads. Yes, vertically. They were caught in such an intense and rapid catastrophic flow that gravity was not able to cause all of their dead carcasses to fall over on their sides. Famed Mount St. Helens geologist Steve Austin is also the world's leading expert on nautiloid fossils and has worked in the canyon and presented his findings to the park's rangers at the invitation of National Park Service officials. Austin points out, as is true of many of the world's mass fossil graveyards, that this enormous nautiloid deposition provides indisputable proof of the extremely rapid formation of a significant layer of limestone near the bottom of the canyon, a layer like the others we've been told about, that allegedly formed at the bottom of a calm and placid sea with slow and gradual sedimentation. But a million nautiloids, standing on their heads, literally, would beg to differ. At our sister stie, RSR provides the relevant Geologic Society of America abstract, links, and video. * Now It's Allegedly Two Million Year-Old Leaves: "When we started pulling leaves out of the soil, that was surreal, to know that it's millions of years old..." sur-re-al: adjective: a bizarre mix of fact and fantasy. In this case, the leaves are the facts. Earth scientists from Ohio State and the University of Minnesota say that wood and leaves they found in the Canadian Arctic are at least two million years old, and perhaps more than ten million years old, even though the leaves are just dry and crumbly and the wood still burns! * Gold Precipitates in Veins in Less than a Second: After geologists submitted for decades to the assumption that each layer of gold would deposit at the alleged super slow rates of geologic process, the journal Nature Geoscience reports that each layer of deposition can occur within a few tenths of a second. Meanwhile, at the Lihir gold deposit in Papua New Guinea, evolutionists assumed the more than 20 million ounces of gold in the Lihir reserve took millions of years to deposit, but as reported in the journal Science, geologists can now demonstrate that the deposit could have formed in thousands of years, or far more quickly! Iceland's not-so-old Surtsey Island looks ancient. * Surtsey Island, Iceland: Of the volcanic island that formed in 1963, New Scientist reported in 2007 about Surtsey that "geographers... marvel that canyons, gullies and other land features that typically take tens of thousands or millions of years to form were created in less than a decade." Yes. And Sigurdur Thorarinsson, Iceland's chief geologist, wrote in the months after Surtsey formed, "that the time scale," he had been trained "to attach to geological developments is misleading." [For what is said to] take thousands of years... the same development may take a few weeks or even days here [including to form] a landscape... so varied and mature that it was almost beyond belief... wide sandy beaches and precipitous crags... gravel banks and lagoons, impressive cliffs… hollows, glens and soft undulating land... fractures and faultscarps, channels and screes… confounded by what met your eye... boulders worn by the surf, some of which were almost round... -Iceland's chief geologist * The Palouse River Gorge: In the southeast of Washington State, the Palouse River Gorge is one of many features formed rapidly by 500 cubic miles of water catastrophically released with the breaching of a natural dam in the Lake Missoula Flood (which gouged out the Scablands as described above). So, hard rock can be breached and eroded rapidly. * Leaf Shapes Identical for 190 Million Years? From Berkley.edu, "Ginkgo biloba... dates back to... about 190 million years ago... fossilized leaf material from the Tertiary species Ginkgo adiantoides is considered similar or even identical to that produced by modern Ginkgo biloba trees... virtually indistinguishable..." The literature describes leaf shapes as "spectacularly diverse" sometimes within a species but especially across the plant kingdom. Because all kinds of plants survive with all kinds of different leaf shapes, the conservation of a species retaining a single shape over alleged deep time is a telling issue. Darwin's theory is undermined by the unchanging shape over millions of years of a species' leaf shape. This lack of change, stasis in what should be an easily morphable plant trait, supports the broader conclusion that chimp-like creatures did not become human beings and all the other ambitious evolutionary creation of new kinds are simply imagined. (Ginkgo adiantoides and biloba are actually the same species. Wikipedia states, "It is doubtful whether the Northern Hemisphere fossil species of Ginkgo can be reliably distinguished." For oftentimes, as documented by Dr. Carl Werner in his Evolution: The Grand Experiment series, paleontogists falsely speciate identical specimens, giving different species names, even different genus names, to the fossil and living animals that appear identical.) * Box Canyon, Idaho: Geologists now think Box Canyon in Idaho, USA, was carved by a catastrophic flood and not slowly over millions of years with 1) huge plunge pools formed by waterfalls; 2) the almost complete removal of large basalt boulders from the canyon; 3) an eroded notch on the plateau at the top of the canyon; and 4) water scour marks on the basalt plateau leading to the canyon. Scientists calculate that the flood was so large that it could have eroded the whole canyon in as little as 35 days. See the journal Science, Formation of Box Canyon, Idaho, by Megaflood, and the Journal of Creation, and Creation Magazine. * Manganese Nodules Rapid Formation: Allegedly, as claimed at the Wikipedia entry from 2005 through 2021: "Nodule growth is one of the slowest of all geological phenomena – in the order of a centimeter over several million years." Wow, that would be slow! And a Texas A&M Marine Sciences technical slide presentation says, “They grow very slowly (mm/million years) and can be tens of millions of years old", with RWU's oceanography textbook also putting it at "0.001 mm per thousand years." But according to a World Almanac documentary they have formed "around beer cans," said marine geologist Dr. John Yates in the 1997 video Universe Beneath the Sea: The Next Frontier. There are also reports of manganese nodules forming around ships sunk in the First World War. See more at at youngearth.com, at TOL, in the print edition of the Journal of Creation, and in this typical forum discussion with atheists (at the Chicago Cubs forum no less :). * "6,000 year-old" Mitochondrial Eve: As the Bible calls "Eve... the mother of all living" (Gen. 3:20), genetic researchers have named the one woman from whom all humans have descended "Mitochondrial Eve." But in a scientific attempt to date her existence, they openly admit that they included chimpanzee DNA in their analysis in order to get what they viewed as a reasonably old date of 200,000 years ago (which is still surprisingly recent from their perspective, but old enough not to strain Darwinian theory too much). But then as widely reported including by Science magazine, when they dropped the chimp data and used only actual human mutation rates, that process determined that Eve lived only six thousand years ago! In Ann Gibbon's Science article, "Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock," rather than again using circular reasoning by assuming their conclusion (that humans evolved from ape-like creatures), they performed their calculations using actual measured mutation rates. This peer-reviewed journal then reported that if these rates have been constant, "mitochondrial Eve… would be a mere 6000 years old." See also the journal Nature and creation.com's "A shrinking date for Eve," and Walt Brown's assessment. Expectedly though, evolutionists have found a way to reject their own unbiased finding (the conclusion contrary to their self-interest) by returning to their original method of using circular reasoning, as reported in the American Journal of Human Genetics, "calibrating against recent evidence for the divergence time of humans and chimpanzees," to reset their mitochondrial clock back to 200,000 years. * Even Younger Y-Chromosomal Adam: (Although he should be called, "Y-Chromosomal Noah.") While we inherit our mtDNA only from our mothers, only men have a Y chromosome (which incidentally genetically disproves the claim that the fetus is "part of the woman's body," since the little boy's y chromosome could never be part of mom's body). Based on documented mutation rates on and the extraordinary lack of mutational differences in this specifically male DNA, the Y-chromosomal Adam would have lived only a few thousand years ago! (He's significantly younger than mtEve because of the genetic bottleneck of the global flood.) Yet while the Darwinian camp wrongly claimed for decades that humans were 98% genetically similar to chimps, secular scientists today, using the same type of calculation only more accurately, have unintentionally documented that chimps are about as far genetically from what makes a human being a male, as mankind itself is from sponges! Geneticists have found now that sponges are 70% the same as humans genetically, and separately, that human and chimp Y chromosomes are "horrendously" 30%
SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived
With the supremely confident Sonnet 55, William Shakespeare returns to a theme he has handled similarly deftly before: the power of poetry itself to make the young man live forever. In a departure from previous instances, he here appears to borrow directly from Horace and Ovid, who are both Roman poets of the turn into the first millennium of the Common Era, striking a therefore more generic note, but unlike these classical precedents for verses that can outlast the supposedly durable substances of physical structures, he employs his poem once again not to celebrate himself but to praise his young lover.
馬雅文明 má yǎ wén míng - Maya civilization 薩爾瓦多 sà ěr wǎ duō - El Salvador 瓜地馬拉 guā dì mǎ lā - Guatemala 貝里斯 bèi lǐ sī - Belize 宏都拉斯 hóng dū lā sī - Honduras 前古典期 qián gǔ diǎn qī - Preclassic period 古典期 gǔ diǎn qī - Classic period 後古典期 hòu gǔ diǎn qī - Postclassic period - 前古典期 Preclassic period 西元 xī yuán - AD (Anno Domini), Common Era 聚落 jù luò - settlement, village 神廟 shén miào - a temple or shrine that enshrines a god or a goddes 衰落 shuāi luò - decline, fall - 古典期 Classic period 城邦 chéng bāng - city-state 居住 jū zhù - reside, live, dwell 貿易 mào yì - trade, commerce, business 戰亂 zhàn luàn - war and chaos 瘟疫 wēn yì - epidemic, plague 旱災 hàn zāi - drought, dry spell 統治者 tǒng zhì zhě - ruler, governor, leader 權威 quán wēi - authority, power - 後古典期 Postclassic period 戰亂頻仍 zhàn luàn pín réng - frequent warfare 托爾特克人 tuō ěr tè kè rén - Toltec people 征服 zhēng fú - conquer, subjugate 好戰 hào zhàn - warlike, fond of war 馬雅潘 Mǎ yǎ pān - The League of Mayapan 基切王國 Jī qiè wáng guó - Kʼicheʼ kingdom 霸權統治 bà quán tǒng zhì - hegemonic rule Follow me on Instagram: fangfang.chineselearning I hope you like today's podcast! Got feedback? I'd love to hear it! Rate my podcast show or leave me a review! Learn Chinese Podcast | Chinese Listening Practice | Learn Taiwanese Mandarin | Chinese Learning Podcast
Piping through mountains and glens, the great god Pan carries the relentless procreative power of nature. He symbolizes the archaic level of psyche from which all wild instinct rises; feared during war as his panic could undo even the Titans and attacked in the Common Era as the image of the devil. Half man and half goat, Pan's untamed sexuality evoked rapture and impulsivity. As the god of shepherds, he ushered young men into puberty, introducing them to the spring rut in their flocks and their own bodies. In the first 30 years of the Christian era, Plutarch wrote that a sailor heard a divine proclamation, “The great god Pan is dead!” This foreshadowed the fate of natural sexuality as it encountered the ascetic demands of Christianity. The anthesis of Christ's innocence and virtue, the lustful goat-foot-god, was recast as the prime cosmic offender. And so, Pan-ic was slowly redirected from fear-driven flocks racing from danger to the human conscience fleeing from the evils of the flesh. The triumph of ego control over instinct was the goal of many religions and philosophies. Civilization itself rose from repression and redirection of primal instincts. The great god Pan was yoked to the engine of art and industry, providing seemingly endless energy. Freud named the cost of strangling Pan's lust as he developed his concept of the pleasure principle and psychosexual theory. Neurosis was the strange revenge of cut-off sexuality creating symptoms from hysterical blindness to intolerable moods. Jung understood that banishing images and rituals representing archetypal forces left humans vulnerable to dangerous affects both individually and collectively. Today, mass Pan-ic dances through social media setting off one frenzy or another. The renewed demonization of sexuality and the deification of malignant innocence is an old tactic made new again. Panic disorder has its roots in the same inner conflict. Jung warned that cutting off conscious access to archetypal forces leads to the rise of fascism and other rage-driven mass movements. If we can welcome the renewing powers of nature and restore the medicine of healthy instincts, we may yet avert the worst repercussions of killing Pan. It is not enough to champion ecological causes in the outer world; we must extend that to our inner landscape. The divine beasts that graze in our imaginal meadows and the strange gods that beckon in our dream forests also require careful tending. The way we treat Pan inside us is mirrored in the way we treat nature around us. Then we might join the poet Eleanor Farjeon and say, “Arcadia! it is the very music Of the first spring-tide rippling its first wave Over the naked, laughing baby world ... Come again, thou sparkling spring-tide, come again, Rush in and flood this autumn from my soul!” BECOME A DREAM INTERPRETER: We've created DREAM SCHOOL to teach others how to work with their dreams. A vibrant community has constellated around this mission, and we think you'll love it. Check it out. PLEASE GIVE US A HAND: Hey folks -- We need your help. So please BECOME OUR PATRON and keep This Jungian Life podcast up and running. SHARE YOUR DREAM WITH US: SUBMIT YOUR DREAM HERE FOR A POSSIBLE PODCAST INTERPRETATION.
During today's conversation on Back Porch Theology – the third in our “Wild About Jesus” series – we're going to talk about the fact that Jesus is a proven historical figure. In fact, there's overwhelming evidence about the work and person of Jesus Christ from numerous non-Christian sources from the earliest centuries of the Common Era! In his book, The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, pastor and theologian Dr. Tim Keller writes about a man who told a pastor he'd be happy to believe in Christianity if the pastor could give him a watertight argument for its legitimacy. The pastor replied, "What if God hasn't given us a watertight argument, but rather a watertight person.” Dr. Keller goes on to say that faith and certainty grow as we get to know more about Jesus – who He is and what He did. If someone you love has serious doubts about the historicity of Jesus and you feel like you've hit a dead end when it comes to talking with them about Christianity, today's conversation might help you re-engage with them. So please grab a cup of coffee and your Bible – unless you're driving or changing the oil on your John Deere, of course – and come hang out on the porch with Ally, Dr. Howard and me! Follow Us On Instagram! @BackPorchTheologyPodcast @LisaDHarper @AllisonAllen @Jim.Howard.Co
It's not explicitly stated, but the theme of the firstborn first appears in the opening narratives of the Hebrew Bible. In Genesis 1 and 2, Yahweh elevates humans, the latecomers of creation, to rule the land. In Genesis 3, a snake, who is some kind of spiritual being, tricks the humans despite their authority as God's image bearers. This story is echoed in other accounts of sibling rivalry that continue throughout the Hebrew Bible. Join Tim and Jon as they discuss the land rulers and sky rulers and the theme of the firstborn in Genesis 1-3.View full show notes from this episode →Timestamps Part one (00:00-14:38)Part two (14:38-36:14)Part three (36:14-55:26)Part four (55:26-01:07:43)Referenced ResourcesTraditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible As It Was at the Start of the Common Era, James L. KugelInterested in more? Check out Tim's library here.You can experience the literary themes and movements we're tracing on the podcast in the BibleProject app, available for Android and iOS.Show Music “Defender (Instrumental)” by TENTS"Maple Leaves" by Stan Forebee & Inf"In Between" by Enluv & Molly McPhaulStem from a license-free music libraryShow produced by Cooper Peltz with Associate Producer Lindsey Ponder. Edited by Dan Gummel, Tyler Bailey, and Frank Garza. Podcast annotations for the BibleProject app by Hannah Woo.Powered and distributed by Simplecast.
I discuss the very difficult period of Hekate's History from Roman Times, through Christianity, to today. Note that this is a heavy discussion, including references to violence, misogyny, and patriarchy. Take good care while watching. It all ends well, with the redemption of Hekate during the 20th century. Hekate is an ancient goddess who stands for a balance between darkness and light. In Part 2, I discuss Hekate's History from the start of the Common Era until today. Hekate was often incorrectly seen as a symbol of evil during the period between the Roman Empire up until recent times. Today she is being reintroduced into popular culture and spirituality as an invitation to claim the key for the journey back to wholeness. View the transcript (click on the magnifying glass; great for finding the source materials I mention), and watch with CC HERE. View a PDF of the slides from this talk (also great for the sources) HERE. Entering Hekate's Cave: The Journey Through Darkness to Wholeness available from major online booksellers. Check out my LinkTree for more. Ethics: https://keepingherkeys.com/ethics
Despite living much of his life as a pagan, the Roman emperor Constantine (272–337 ad) implemented reforms that stopped the systematic persecution of Christians. He also instituted the calendar we use, dividing all of history into bc (Before Christ) and ad (Anno Domini, or Year of our Lord). A move to secularize this system has changed the labels to ce (Common Era) and bce (Before the Common Era). Some people point to this as yet one more example of how the world keeps God out. But God hasn’t gone anywhere. Regardless of the name, our calendar still centers itself around the reality of Jesus’ life on earth. In the Bible, the book of Esther is unusual in that it contains no specific mention of God. Yet the story it tells is one of God’s deliverance. Banished from their homeland, the Jewish people lived in a country indifferent to Him. A powerful government official wanted to kill them all (Esther 8:8–9, 13). Yet through Queen Esther and her cousin Mordecai, God delivered His people, a story still celebrated to this day in the Jewish holiday of Purim (9:20–32). Regardless of how the world chooses to respond to Him now, Jesus changed everything. He introduced us to an uncommon era—one full of genuine hope and promise. All we need to do is look around us. We’ll see Him.
The Olmec civilization is what is known as an archaeological culture. This means there is a collection of artifacts thought by archaeologists to represent a particular society. What is known about archaeological cultures is based on artifacts, rather than texts. In the case of the Olmec, archaeologists think artifacts found primarily on the northern half of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mesoamerica from 1200–500 C.E. timeframe represent the Olmec society. The name Olmec was actually invented by scholars. Derived from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word “Olmecatl”, which means “inhabitant of the rubber country”, Olmec is a reference to the rubber production in the area where many of the artifacts have been found.There are several Olmec sites thought to be important centers of activity, of which San Lorenzo and La Venta are the most significant. San Lorenzo, about 56 kilometers (35 miles) south of the Gulf of Mexico in the modern Mexican state of Veracruz, was at its height around 1150 to 900 C.E. La Venta, east of San Lorenzo and closer to the Gulf Coast (15 kilometers/9 miles) in the modern Mexican state of Tabasco, reached its height in about 900–500 C.E. Research at these and other sites has led to the following insights. The Olmec diet initially included foods from fishing and hunting. Maize and other crops were a later addition to their foodstuffs. The Olmec created massive monuments, including colossal stone heads, thrones, stela (upright slabs), and statues. They may have been the originators of the Mesoamerican ball game, a ceremonial team sport played throughout the region for centuries. They also built earthen mounds and pyramids, and ceramics of several types that became common throughout a broad region influenced by the Olmec civilization.The Olmec Civilization was one of the most influential ancient civilizations of the early Americas, and though its dominance of the region faded in the last centuries before the Common Era, the Olmec civilization is commonly thought to be the “mother culture” of many other cultures that appeared in the region in later years. These cultures, such as the Maya, Zapotec, Totonac, and Teotihuacán civilizations have unique art, architecture, and cultures that separate them from each other, but many historians trace all of these cultures back to their shared Olmec heritage.Maya Exploration Center Director Dr. Ed Barnhart has almost three decades of experience as an archaeologist, an explorer and an instructor. He is a Fellow of the Explorers Club, has published many papers, and appeared in over a dozen documentaries about ancient civilizations. His involvement in Maya studies began in 1990 as an archaeological intern in the ruins of Copan, Honduras. In January of 1996 he was invited to return to Copan and help the University of Pennsylvania excavate the early acropolis and the tomb of the city's lineage founder.
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