Essays
Essays in antiquity
A continuing inquiry into the ancient world: its politics, its silences, and the arguments it left behind.
New · A visual essay in eleven objects
The Flood, in Objects
From a Babylonian noise complaint to a Chinese engineer, the flood stories of five traditions, told through the tablets, scrolls and pages they survive on.
Begin the storyThe Flood Tablet, British Museum. Photograph by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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The Empire in Receipts
Thirty thousand clay tablets record what the Persian empire actually paid for, and the picture is nothing like the one its enemies left us.
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Was the Khipu Writing?
Spanish officials read tribute records off Inca khipu, then ordered them destroyed. On knotted cords, the definition of writing, and what was really lost.
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Silently Preserved, in Objects
Most people in classical Greece left no words of their own. Here is what survives of them, one object at a time.
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Against Easy Histories
The Cyrus Cylinder is not a human rights charter. On survival bias, periodisation and hindsight, the things that make history look tidy, and how to read against them.
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The Flood, in Objects
Flood stories turn up everywhere from Babylon to China. Here is the evidence they survive on, one object at a time.
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Everyone Has a Flood
Once upon a time, the gods destroyed humanity because it was simply too loud. On flood myths from Babylon to China, and why the differences matter more than the similarities.
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Silently Preserved
Two thousand helots were freed, garlanded, and led in procession round the temples. Then Thucydides records that no one knew how any of them perished. On the people classical Greece left out.
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The Grammar of Empire
Rome could not declare war on Pyrrhus without hurling a spear into enemy soil, and Epirus lay a sea away. So it made a plot of land inside the city legally foreign.
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