[saturninleather]

[nation40-deactivated20251030]

[deathandmysticism]

Death and Napoleon, The two kings of terror, 1813

[paganimagevault]

Mummified heads from Xiaohe cemetery 2000 BCE

"Readers of Language Log will certainly be aware of Tocharian, but when I began my international research project on the Tarim Basin mummies in 1991, very few people — only a tiny handful of esoteric researchers — had ever heard of the Tocharians and their language since they went extinct more than a millennium ago, until fragmentary manuscripts were discovered in the early part of the 20th century and were deciphered by Sieg und Siegling (I always love the sound of their surnames linked together by "und"), two German Indologists / philologists — Emil Sieg (1866-1951) and Wilhelm Siegling (1880-1946), in the first decade of the last century.

It wasn't long after the decipherment of Tocharian by Sieg und Siegling that historical linguists began to realize the monumental importance of this hitherto completely unknown language. First of all, it is the second oldest — after Hittite — Indo-European language to branch off from PIE. Second, even though its historical seat was on the back doorstep of Sinitic and it loaned many significant words (e.g., "honey", "lion") to the latter, it is a centum (Hellenic, Celtic, Italic and Germanic) language lying to the east of the satem (Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic) IE languages. (PROVISO: some sophists will undoubtedly argue that the centum-satem split in Indo-European is meaningless; it has happened before on Language Log and elsewhere, but I think it does matter for the history of IE languages and the people who spoke them.) Third, Tocharian has grammatical features that resemble Italic, Celtic, and Germanic (i.e., northwest European languages) more than they do the other branches of IE. (STIPULATION: certain casuists will surely argue that such differences are meaningless, but I believe they are crucial for comprehending the nature of the spread of IE in time and space.) Etc.

Because their physical, textual, and cultural remains were indisputably found in the Tarim Basin, the Tocharians naturally became a primary focus of my investigations in Eastern Central Asia during the more than two decades from the nineties through 2012."

-Victor Mair, Language Log: The sound and sense of Tocharian. University of Pennsylvania.

[ehresherpa]

[riverlarking]

[leforetenchante]

Isabelle Adjani for Vogue Italia, August 2004

[adritatu]

Jean Christophe Béchet – The Mysteries of Venice

[stlamb]

antique medical sryinges and various blades for surgical equipment

[apotheose44]

Jon Nazca | Reuters

[inatcanids]

Gray Wolf (Canis lupus)

Observed by scwraw, CC BY-NC

[memories-of-ancients]

Silver brooches uncovered near Pentney in Norfolk, England, late 8th -9th century AD

[devayana]

"I have always dreamed," he mouthed, fiercely, "of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means, strong enough to give themselves frankly the name of destroyers, and free from the taint of that resigned pessimism which rots the world. No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity--that's what I would have liked to see."

Joseph Conrad from The Secret Agent.

[wingsofnettles]

[zentropista]

Chinese executioner with severed heads, 1920s

[radric-davis-deactivated2013041]

[saccharine-dreamer]

Jean Paul Gaultier 1999 Spring/Summer Couture Collection