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Showing posts with the label Ancient History

Anonymous - The Maxims of Ptahhotep (Small Works List)

 I felt the snake bite here of wandering to far afield from the original intention of this project. I had a very underdeveloped list of ancient writings in one of the segments of the Small Works List. Because of this, I thought that I should find some way of coming to terms with this lacking in the list and find a way to fold in a more robust catalog of the literature of the ancient world. I have studied Christian theology and Church history at the graduate level and so I thought I might have some sense of what might be hiding behind this veil but I was woefully mistaken at my purchase into this arena. I was confronted by this with the issue of simply getting my hands on a readable copy of this text.  I am not sure where I went to flesh out these category, but I had a smattering of readings especially from Ancient Egypt on the same list as the Greeks. The time frame that these things exist in are as far away as modern American writings are from early Christian writings and so I don'

The Lamentation of the Destruction of Ur

 I hope that this project does not totally spin out of control with the endless introductions of new lists. I don't know how The Lamentation of the Destruction of Ur got on my list. I imagine at one point I was skimming through the Norton Anthology of World Literature and there is some slight reference to it which may have been enough to prompt me to add it to an Ancient Literature list. I have no idea but I thought to add it as an Anonymous entry and leave it for 35 years from now. Now that I am a year into this project, many books and research questions have been asked I pull this strange text out of the ether and I confront it head on.  One of the challenges of selecting books based off of their titles alone is that many times there is not a collected, singular volume of a text available that I can simply buy online, listen to an audiobook version of and move along. This text was written somewhere between 2112 B.C. and 2004 B.C. according to Wikipedia (which seems younger than I