The story so far…

To continue with this literary project of mine, it’s gone through a couple of iterations as I’ve tried to figure out how I want to share what I’m reading. It occurs to me most people probably don’t want to hear a book report. If I happen to include a cool quotation or two, that’s probably fine, and maybe a little understanding about where the document came from is probably enough. It’s one thing if you’re going to try and go through a series of videos with all this information, but if you just want to create opportunities for people to talk, that seems a lot more beneficial. So drawing on the notes I have, I’ll just back up to where I was at the beginning of the year.

After trying livestreaming and failing miserably, I tried doing scripted YouTube videos for a few months, and over those months, progress went very slowly. I did however, look into some rather fascinating documents. I looked at the Instructions of Shurrupak and the Kesh Temple Hymn from around 2600 BC. These clay tablets found me spending an inordinate amount of time looking up Ancient Sumerian gods and taking a crash course on Sumerian history in general which I knew next to nothing about. I then hopped forward a little bit to read Samuel A. B. Mercer’s translation of the Pyramid Texts (Precursors to to the Book of the Dead) taken from the writings on the walls of several pyramids in and around Saqqara, circa 2400 BC, as well as Toby A.H. Wilkinson’s translation of “The Royal Annals of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt.” The latter, being a less available document, involved a trip to a library across the state in order to avoid shelling out the money to buy it which as I noted in that video, would have amounted to the price of a small couch had I not sought it at one of our public institutions. Still, that was a fun trip, and I learned a lot from that book about what the Egyptian royalty felt was important, such as when the Pharaoh presided over seasonal events and Jubilees, and how much the Nile rose every year, rather important when that determines whether or not you can grow food.

Both books were also pretty neat in that they discussed the various translated versions and the history of the different archaeologists in getting the scholarship on these documents to the point they were at the time these books were written, which resulted in me adding a few works from some of the other scientists mentioned. Lots of French guys involved there.

I guess that’s enough to start with, I’ll conclude what I’ve already read in a later post. Anyone else in the audience read these documents? What did you think about them?