lazy, hazy, crazy history
August is no time for serious reading and research. Hence, in place of a serious post, here is a fun quote followed by some Egyptian eye candy to peruse while you’re waiting to head out to the beach.
History is not in the sources. The sources are nothing but the universe in which the historian’s hypotheses are tested. The sources are the remnants and relics of the historical processes that the historian wants to reconstruct. The sources challenge the historian’s creativity by being the most painful obstacle in his path: there are always too few, or too many, or both, and taken together, they never square…The sources are the scattered remnants of a past world that is irretrievably lost, because it is past. Although we have only the sources to reconstruct that lost world in our imagination, the sources are nothing if they are not used by our imagination. A house is more than a number of bricks, and a picture more than seven ounces of paint.
-Knauf, Ernst Axel. 1992. The Cultural Impact of Secondary State Formation: The Cases of the Edomites and Moabites. In Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan, ed. Piotr Bienkowski. Sheffield Archaeological Monographs 7. J.R. Collis Publications, p. 47
Let’s play Stump the Grad Student. After six years of studying this stuff, I knew numbers 1, 2, 5, 9, 12. So often I hear myself saying this, but I hope my profs at the U of C never hear of this.
There are many pictures of Egyptian artifacts on the internet, but I feel they look their best at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and there’s more than the usual mummies.
If you feel you need more words with your pretty pictures, here are some, and some more.
topher wrote:
I got 1 2 3 7 9 11 12 15 thanks to the GR Museum’s Egyptian exhibit. 🙂 Some of those pics were misleading though. I would have gotten the lamp easily if the picture angle had been different. As it is, it looks more like a European lute body. Same for number 5, the mirror, If it had been brassy and reflective, I probably would have gotten it. As it is, I guessed it was a fan, since they didn’t have ping pong back then. 🙂
Posted on 08-Aug-05 at 8:56 am | Permalink
Michele wrote:
Good job! The pictures threw me off on a couple, too. I’m glad someone else acknowledged the problem with the pictures, as I have a Lucy Van Pelt-worthy lineup of excuses for doing poorly on quizzes by this time, and can no longer tell whether any of them actually hold water or not in any given circumstance.
Posted on 08-Aug-05 at 2:21 pm | Permalink