Things were hard for the people who built an instant capital city for the Dear Leader. Researchers examining skeletons in the commoners’ cemetery in Amarna have discovered that many of the city’s children were malnourished and stunted. Adults show signs of backbreaking work, including high levels of injuries associated with accidents. “We have evidence of [...]
Nine years ago I wrote a post about Islamist reaction against popular Middle Eastern singers such as Haifa Wehbe. For some reason, I kept working in references to Sappho. The process continues. Now a court in the new, improved Islamist Egypt has ordered al-Tet, a television channel devoted to belly dancing, shut down. The channel [...]
• Pharoah Tutankhamun was a lot more important dead than he ever was during his short life. So for him, can we say that the embalmers and craftsmen did give him immortality? • Magic is a way of living: or why Dion Fortune got it wrong, from Anne Hill. • Sannion on why you do [...]
To begin with, there were just a handful of them. And some are going silent, as Cara Schulz writes for the Pagan Newswire Collective: The situation in Syria appears to be more grave, according to the last messages I received from the five Pagans I chat with regularly. They spoke of the fighting and how [...]
At The Hairpin, A Q&A with author, photographer, and ossuary expert Paul Koudounaris. Two quotes: Back in grad school I was known as the Fox Mulder of the art history department. Everyone else was working on Rembrandt and I was looking at woodblock prints of witches. . . . If you consider Psycho, the one [...]
What were they doing with 20-sided dice? Here is one speculation: The symbols for eta, theta, and epsilon can be clearly seen. Maybe it was used to determine which frat the ancients were going to pledge, but I’d like to think it was used to roll for hit points for warrior and sphinx classes. Now [...]
When I read an article like “Millions of Mummy Puppies Revealed at Egyptian Catacombs,” I realize how little we know about what was really going on with popular religion there centuries ago. It’s one thing to study the tombs of high-ranking individuals. We still put high-ranking individuals in fancy tombs, and we make pilgrimages to [...]
This may be the worst sort of environmental determinism, but what is it with Egypt? Is there something in the Nile water? For centuries Egyptian Paganism seemed to function—on one level—as as sort of post office of the dead. All those mummified cats, ibises, crocodiles, etc. neatly stacked in little p.o. boxes. What’s with that? [...]
Washington Post writer Sally Quinn looks at photos of Egyptian soldiers beating an abaya-shrouded Muslim woman, and a light bulb goes on for her about major religions: Why would men, particularly under the guise of religious belief, want to keep women down? Because they understand that women’s sexuality is something that they cannot live without, [...]
In 1957, a young artist named Lora Vigné and her husband moved from Southern California to San Francisco. “It was 1957, the beginning of the Beatnik era, and we fitted the description,” she writes in her memoir, The Goddess Bade Me Do It! No poser bohemian, she was already producing commercial ceramic pieces and enamel [...]
