The second in my series of ancient sayings—exactly what you need if you're tired of the same old proverbs and feel like you need to update your repertoire with some fresh 4000 year old variations! #AncientSayings https://youtu.be/TRQbU9NtGVQ?si=QopHNHzBs8hsPJtm#AncientSayings

I wrote about a camp, 27 girls who drowned due to astonishing failures to plan, and hundreds of families going back anyway. nymag.com/intelligence...

I'm launching part of a new project today, bringing 4000-year-old proverbs to the modern audiences who crave them! Go check it out and subscribe, because there will be new proverbs every day! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKVdJytXEMwkNW3DQ2PZZGQ

7 days before dissertation deadline 😮‍💨

#New on #OCIANA: Is this the oldest #Arabic inscription yet discovered? The famous #Bāyir inscription is now online. An ancient Arab calls upon the Canaanite gods: Malkom, Kemosh, and Qaws to protect the wells of Bāyir (ancient: ʾabāʾir). Find more: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions...

Are you looking to read more about Ea-nāṣir, the Bronze Age, or Mesopotamia? I archive many of my Bluesky threads here: www.aandeloucas.com/conversations

We've gone viral, folks

In line with discussion about the job market, the latest majors being closed at Syracuse University:

Check out this thread and all the quote posts and their threads. Here’s my 2 cents which comes from my years doing machine learning work for Coptic lit and language. I have submitted 2 grant proposals recently for Coptic machine translation leveraging LLMs, into English and Arabic+

I find that this issue usually just comes down to observing that research would be easier if there were less translation work to do, which is tautologically true, but that statement could equally have been made before AI existed, and just because the use cases of LLMs are currently the centre (1/4)

This is an interesting use case for AI translation of an ancient language. I'm less interested in discussing the ethics of it than I am interested in exploring the economy that fosters a project like this. I've shared some thoughts below, I'd be glad to hear your thoughts:

Pokopia is a tributary state simulator

Press release for our new paper! “…people across the world created inclusive political systems, even under difficult conditions…An understanding of the hallmarks of autocracy and democracy can help identify threats and pump the brakes on burgeoning totalitarian regimes.” phys.org/news/2026-03...

tušāma ina urri iššira damiqtī arḫu innammaru inammira šamšī "Perhaps, at daybreak, good things will come to me A new moon will appear, my sun will shine." A couplet from Babylonian poem, Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, whose protagonist hopes for better days. A lengthy, beautiful, bizarre work of literature.

Feels so weird that I am an Iranologist and that Iran as a country might no longer exist. I know the culture goes way beyond the nation-state, & that I work on the pre-modern period, but it still is a bit odd to be a specialist of a land that everyone seems to hate & gleefully watch being destroyed…

In Saskatoon, the Museum of Antiquities at the University of Saskatchewan recently got these incredible facsimiles. Fantastic to bring my Archaeology of Mesopotamia students to visit and discuss these pieces. #Archaeology #USask #SteleOfHammurabi

This reminds me of something Toni Morrison wrote.

Everyone wants to make sea trade exotic and sexy, but no one wants to talk about Gulf eddies and seasonal wind patterns

In the process of cleaning up a footnote on Persian Gulf maritime travel, I ran into the claim that "Ea-nasir went on to travel to India," citing 70 year old material that doesn't even say this. Why do historians (derogatory) do this?

Julius Caesar in 49: "The die is cast" Julius Caesar in 2026: "Consult the prediction markets"

Hey, I reconstructed some #Aramaic letter names! Going back to around 500 BCE, I guess. The similarity to #Greek is usually explained via #Phoenician, but we don't actually have any Phoenician letter names AFAIK.

You can also read it online: www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/a...

Maybe not

I'm so excited/honored to give a SIGMA Seminar this Wednesday, March 4! Join me to learn about how Babylonian maths are depicted in games. I promise the math content will be cool and approachable.

I am here today because of UIowa's Classics and Religious Studies programs, which are merging next academic year. If you support study of the ancient world, its languages and cultures, please consider signing this petition:

Monarchs are only as powerful as their institutions allow, their impunity being the consequence of weak constraints of that power. This morning's news is an example of continued failure to act like a Republic by our legislative and judicial branches. Call your representatives.

Do you have questions about AI and LLMs? Are you in the NYC area? I've asked a friend, colleague, and former student to come give all us humanist types the basics. It will be excellent! @cuny.edu @sentantiq.bsky.social @isawnyu.bsky.social

Last chapter to edit, 4 weeks to go

Budgets are moral documents and even the most apparently boring technical decision (what and how you count) defines which kind of knowledge gets rewarded and which kind gets forgotten.

How to make perfume in 1230 BCE in the heartland of ancient Assyria. First, you need to mix cane with cleansed water from the palace well of the city of Aššur (pronounced Ashur). Second, you need to pour this mixture into a special vessel before adding...

Not the best balk of the neighborhood, but decent

Serendipitous Mesopotamia meets cheese shop

We aren't in Boston anymore

DOCTOR Rümeysa Öztürk has earned her PhD!!

Reject live market predictions for news, return to tradition, live(r) market predictions for news.

In bibliography hell, please send patience and small rewards for every page I get through

Quarterly update to the personal website Tell your friends & family to talk with me about Roman slavery, Christian apocrypha, or ancient Palestine chancebonar.hcommons.org

There's going to be an anime of "Red River": time traveler girl stuck in the Bronze Age Hittite empire…

Scholars are increasingly recognizing the importance of artisan's networks rather than scribal schools for the historical creativity of the alphabet (Sanders 2009, Boyes 2021, Mandell 2023), but what if these were not just sites of innovation but the alphabet’s very lifeblood?

Played cupid today

The spreadsheet on this clay tablet, which is almost 4,000 years old, is organised into columns for furrowed area, grain produced, land not sown, and the field’s name. The first field is called “Of the soldiers who stood in for their fathers”. It’s ancient Excel, but I find that incredibly moving

"[B]ecause the Tigris and the Euphrates flooded unpredictably, it's thought that this affected the characterization of Mesopotamian gods as cruel and capricious when compared to Egyptians, who had a much more predictable river and thus much less violent gods. Is there some truth to this?"

It's looking like Imgur-Ninurta is Lu-Ninurta's granduncle, so I guess family*

On the edge of Bluesky trying to carve out a little piece of the Internet for Mesopotamian studies at the nexus between Archaeology, History, and Classics 🥹

We can securely attribute 13 texts to House I from 1793 to 1733 BCE. Scholars have assumed that the property belonged to Ilum-naši because it was divided amongst his sons. But other than that one single text dividing the estate, we have zero evidence of Ilum-naši. What gives?

Reminder that I'm in my 30s: informing everyone at the doctor's office how grateful I am for the shoehorn they placed next to the stadiometer

Aeschylus, Me, a Mario the father of Greek Kart player tragedy 🤝 Getting smoked by a turtle shell

Announcing—LatinCy Readers v.1.0.2, i.e. LatinCy-powered corpus readers for Latin text collections. Quickly get sentences, lines, words annotated for lemma, POS, morphology, NER, etc. Supporting .txt, .xml, .tess, .conllu, and more. github.com/diyclassics/... #digiclass #nlproc

Great question, 1742-1733 BCE was the height of political tension between Nippur and its state administration under the Babylonian king Samsu-iluna, the son of Hammurabi. In 1742 BCE, the kingdom of Babylon erupted in revolts by no fewer than three major leaders: Rim-Sin, Iluni and Rim-Anum.

I've been obsessing over House I at Nippur. Through a handful of texts excavated back in 1951-52, we're able to reconstruct the division of an estate from the years 1742 to 1733 BCE, dating to the last years of Nippur in the Old Babylonian period.