What Nobody Meant
Six things I find it very hard to shut up about.
- 1
Inherited Property
The people whose language became English, Greek and Hindi left no writing, no buildings and no graves anybody can identify. So how does anyone know they kept bees?
- 2
The Other Face
The Franks claimed they came from Troy. Why would a people only two generations old need ancestors from a famous war fifteen centuries earlier?
- 3
The Break
Around 1200 BC a connected world came apart in about fifty years. What happens to a civilisation's memory of itself when everybody who could read is gone?
- 4
The Apparatus
A machine can invent ten thousand names, every one of them different from all the others. Why do they all feel like the same name?
- 5
What Exists
Every form you have ever filled in had boxes that somebody chose in advance. Whose name does not fit, and who decided that it would not?
- 6
The Older Layer
Sacred texts were copied by hand for centuries, and each generation quietly adjusted what it disagreed with. So why is the older version still sitting in there?