Ankara
Baghdad
Beirut
Paris
In alphabetical order because it disorders, cuts hierarchy, and unifies democratically.
In alphabetical order because of the history of alphabetical order, connecting as it does certain specific geographies and peoples; intelligent life and its expression, preservation, and continuity through artefacts; cultures; humanism(s) and humanity. Alphabetical order is fundamentally human, humane, and humanistic.
Google-Middle(-of)-Earth, from the Indus via the Fertile Crescent cradle of civilisation to the Ice Age Havens
EDITED TO ADD: the French version of that article (amongst others…) fills in the historical gaps glossed over above. Rapidly, Some Missing Links (including some French ones):
(34th c. BCE onwards: Sumerian, Egyptian, Proto-Sinaitic, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Canaanite, Aramaic, South Arabian, Mycenean Linear B, Old Persian, and Brahmi writing systems, alphabets, and written lists; and their various descendants and friends and relations)
4th c. BCE: Greek lists
3rd c. BCE: catalogue of the Library of Alexandria (Zenodotus, Callimachus)
630 CE: Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae
10th-12th c. encyclopaedias: as well as the aforementioned Byzantine Suda, the Italian Elementarium doctrinae rudimentum (Papias) & the French Liber floridus (Lambert)
1240: Bartholomeus Anglicanus (@ Paris, and indeed at Paris University at a key historical time) De proprietatibus rerum
1286: Johannes Balbus / John of Genoa, Catholicon
14th c.: translations into French, English, and other vernaculars & further dissemination: ex. of Barthlomeus Anglicanus (FR 1372, EN 1397)
16th c.: from Erasmus, Adages … to the Index librorum prohibitorum …
This post is mostly images. Some with words. All with ideas. Creativity and imaginative intelligent life go on. Long and healthily may they continue to do so.
Sláinte.
You may recall these image-and-text comments, from January:
And then?
And then.
Well now, then.
So it goes.
Yesterday and today:
The Morgan Library & Museum
“On the Earth one sees all sorts of things.” —The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
COMMENTS, LESSONS, WARNINGS
AFFIRMING LIFE, LOVE, AND LIBERTY
“The” Paris AND The Paris of the Middle East
The last commentative word goes to two cartoonists; the second is at Charlie Hebdo.
This crap is man-made, by (and with and for) stupid aggressive power-obsessed hetero cis males of our species (a.k.a. the abovementioned “assholes”), and the eventual solution is gynarchist revolution.
Yesterday raging I would have gone further and said some further and unkinder things.
Today I am living in hope that educational, humanistic, and artistic therapy can help and work.
Everything depends on critical perspective and the wits to see and deal with wit, though …
Joann Sfar, of “Charlie Hebdo.”
FIDES, SPES, ET CARITAS
Another cardinal creation of human civilisation, to be found from the Fertile Crescent to everywhere else around the world: the Golden Rule
Obligatory medievalist comment, from a 14th-century Flemish book of hours (Baltimore, The Walters Art Museum, W.88, f. 157r)
The last word has to be as counter-crusading and anti-neomedievalist as possible, so it goes to a 13th-c. Persian poet-cum-mystic-cum-theologian and Islamic scholar.
ENDING ON A NOTE OF OPTIMISTIC FUTURISTIC NON-ENDING
FURTHER READING: SOME IMAGE COLLECTIONS
Juliet O’Brien 