Nonfiction Lover’s Treasure Chest
New discoveries:
Read this article: https://greekreporter.com/2025/08/15/song-bronze-age-civilizations
Then listen to the Youtube
Here is a version of the Hymn to Nikkal, from 1400 BC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAc2KDNHEw4
Another version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-Yq_6c9bKg
Fascinating that the first recorded music we have is a woman’s plea to the moon goddess to be granted fertility – a child. Three amazing stories here – the power of the plea (make sure to listen through to the ending of the hymn); histories of music and sound, and the link from India to Mesopotamia. Also found here from a similar time period:
Earliest complete ancient Greek song that we have: https://greekreporter.com/2025/07/30/oldest-song-survive-ancient-greek
And this song is a deathless remembrance of, perhaps, a wife who has passed.
Music began long, long before this. We have found simple flutes that may date from 40-60,000 years ago. But in the Hymn we have not just an instrument but a song, as again in the Greek piece. The whole area of the history of our experience of sound feels so rich and worth exploring.
Books I’m reading – and am eager to discuss/share:
David Eltis, Atlantic Cataclysm, Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trade. (Cambridge, 2025) The back cover of the book is filled with blurbs, starting with lavish praise from Henry Louis Gates. This is a summation of a lifetime’s study, and, as Gates says, it “challenges virtually every popular assumption about the transatlantic slave trade.” It really does. Everyone should read it or read a summary of its conclusions – which are based on a many-scholar-many-decade-long project of gathering data from every recorded ship that transported enslaved people across the Atlantic from the 1500s to the late 1800s. In a word, the real story is about, all about, Brazil. The famed Triangle Trade was tiny and largely irrelevant.
Gary Paul Nabhan, Cumin, Camels, and Caravans, A Spice Odyssey (U of California Press, 2014) I am nosing around studying the spice trade, and Nabhan combines his personal travels with recipes and history – bringing readers into many stories of trade, peoples, and products.
Carlo Rovelli, There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important than Kindness (Riverhead Books, 2018 translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell) Essays and occasional pieces by the Italian physicist whose White Holes I loved. An easy read that feels like a nice appetizer – flavor, interest, notes, and always digestible.
Raimund J. Schulz, To The Ends of the Earth, How Ancient Conquerors, Explorers, Scientists, and Traders Connected the World (Oxford, 2016, translated by Robert Savage) I am very interested in ancient connections and this book probes for what we can learn from myths, archaeology, anthropology about early encounters around the Mediterranean. Clear translation but in a sense the opposite of the Rovelli – the background knowledge it assumes requires more work to get through but opens new avenues of exploration and thought.