A Fretful Porpentine

(eight & twenty) DNI: (1) Shepherds of wool-bearing sheep who pay taxes in silver rather than supplying a white sheep, as is the proper custom; (2) temple administrators who take, in lieu of corvée duty, garments of the type known as "Ear of the Mongoose," outer woolen garments, naked flax, flax tied in bundles, bronze helmets, arrows, burnished leather, wing-feathers of a yellow raven, or goats with full fleece; (3) undertakers who take seven jugs of beer, four hundred and twenty loaves of bread, seventy-two liters of barley, one woolen garment, one bed, and one chair when they bring corpses to the grave; (4) governors who use the oxen of the gods to plow their own garlic and cucumber plots; (5) livestock officials who appropriate asses; (6) livestock managers who appropriate sheep; and (7) fisheries inspectors who appropriate taxes.

[herpsandbirds]

How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field?

[bagdemagus]

You’ve all heard the Sumerian dog bar joke. Get ready for the Sumerian sleepy bear joke:

A bear which for six months had not turned onto his side said: "Were An not to bestow sleep on someone, as he does me, they would expire."

(UET VI, 241)

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

CDLI Literary 000801, ex. 011 (P346319)

Wisdom or proverb tablet excavated in Ur (mod. Tell Muqayyar), dated to the Old Babylonian (ca. 1900-1600 BC) period and now kept in British

[neshamama]

lynette yiadom-boakye, "many menaces," 2022, oil on canvas

[memories-of-ancients]

Gold figurine of a man, Frankish, 5th-6th century AD

from Dumbarton Oaks

[a-book-of-creatures]

The author must have been eating woodland salad, candied acorns, turnip pie, plum-cakes, bilberry tarts, arrowroot shortbread, and glazed maple shoots, and drinking flagons of October ale and raspberry cordial when they wrote this

[elucubrare]

do you think the king's two bodies ever explored each other

[fromtheheather]

The parting of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere (1874) - Julia Margaret Cameron

illustration for The Idylls of the King by Alfred Lord Tennyson

[catullus101]

Lynn Seymour as Ophelia and Rudolf Nureyev as Hamlet in rehearsal for Robert Helpmann's Hamlet.

London, Royal Opera House, 1964. 

Ph. by Roger Jackson

[tridentandtales]

Incense burners, five teracotta women seated around a well, they could be interpreted as members from a local cult, probably that of Demeter or Kore

4th century BCE

The Metropolitan Museum of Arts 2012.546

[inlandwest]

[historical-art]

Judith Leyster, The Last Drop (The Gay Cavalier), c. 1629, oil on canvas, 89.1 × 73.5 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, United States.

[context under the cut]

“The artwork depicts a compelling scene involving two figures and a skeleton. On the left, one figure is tilting his head back, poised to drink the last drop from a glass, while another figure, attired in red with a jovial demeanor, gestures animatedly with a smoking pipe in one hand. The central subject, a skeleton, stands erect between them, dangling an empty glass from its bony fingers, suggesting a connection to the transience of life and the concept of memento mori. The trio is set against a neutral background that throws the focus onto their vividly painted forms. The playful yet macabre tableau is rich with allegorical meaning, a characteristic of genre paintings that often served as moral lessons during the Baroque era.”

Source: “The Last Drop (c. 1629; Netherlands) by Judith Leyster,” Artchive.

[rainevaris]

My first hedgehog photo

i was sad at first it was backlit by the sun, but honestly it made the photo even better

[jhesite]

Edinburgh, day 4 - National gallery

[biggirlwithbigdreams]

Marshes of Southern Iraq - Tor Eigeland (1967)

[marionbulot]

[wizardarchetypes]

i am so serious when i say dark and quiet are both human rights.

i don't mean like absolute silence. obviously in an ideal community, there would still be sound and noise from people and music and work etc. but it haunts me that when i camp in the forest i can hear the howl of semi trucks on the interstate miles away. and the people who live beside it never know quiet. it haunts me that many people will live their whole lives never seeing the stars in the sky that were fully visible with NO electric light pollution as recently as my great-grandparents' childhoods.

so much of our lives is bright bright unnecessary noise. neon mcdonalds signs 200 feet in the air so we can see it from the road. led lights over billboards. parking lots lit up like sports stadiums at closed office buildings. advertisements playing at gasoline pumps. streets lined with led porch lights and decorative garden lights that genuinely threaten entire species of wildlife. music blaring outside pharmacies to deter homeless people. everything always shining and wailing for no purpose but profit and cruelty.

obviously not everything can be turned off or made quiet and i wouldn't want it to be anyway and there is a lot of nuance and room for "but what about" here, but MANY things HAVE to change because none of us are supposed to live like this and we shouldn't have to!!!

[resismedievalmenagerie]

Just some cute little hedgehogs climbing on a grapevine, as they are wont to do. This comes from the 1175 Bestiary.