https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9AOmpk1FSs The appearance of the Dead Sea Scrolls was the most important document discovery of the twentieth century. Yet, in some sense, they didn’t deliver what many assumed to be promised within: that is, the basis for a complete revision...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNEHP6qFeCs From TED-Ed comes an animated introduction to the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek device that dates back to the 2nd century BCE. TED writes: “In 1900, Greek divers stumbled upon a 2,000-year-old shipwreck whose contents would shake our understanding...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHDnfz8EKSs Apart from a few bridges that still work, the infrastructural achievements of the Roman Empire exist, for us, mostly as ruins. With a little imagination, those historic sites give us a clear enough sense of the empire’s sheer might, but...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqZpi8zAqe0 Madman or visionary? A little of both? A genius? A brand? A mensch? David Lynch was all these things and more, and this fan-made video above serves as a quick reminder of the career and the consistency of the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PshQs7LLNiw It doesn’t take too long a look at the almost surrealistically clean-lined buildings of Walter Gropius to get the impression that the man wanted to usher in a new world, especially when you consider that many of them went...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68JUxRH8AZo The playwright Tristan Bernard is said to have eaten lunch at the Eiffel Tower every day, but not because he liked the menu in its café: rather, because it was the only place in Paris with no view of...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aryDMAP6oug Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons reigns as one of the world’s most recognizable early 18th-century pieces, thanks to its frequent appearances in films and television commercials. Upon its debut in 1725, The Four Seasons stunned listeners by telling a story without...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCOQ7jDtkzU No one who travels to Florence can help seeing the dome of the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower. That’s true not just because of its sheer looming physical presence over the rest of the city, but also because...
Image by Tom Palumbo, via Wikimedia Commons Jack Kerouac wants you to turn writing into “free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline, other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5kWDOuY2Uo We know more or less everything we could possibly know about ancient Egyptian civilization. That owes in large part to the advanced state of record-keeping it achieved, and how many of its writings have survived, up to and including...
