Category: History

Lead has been with a very long time

Fascinating new info…

Hominins suffered lead poisoning starting at least 2 million years ago – Ars Technica:

Lead exposure sounds like a modern problem, at least if you define “modern” the way a paleoanthropologist might: a time that started a few thousand years ago with ancient Roman silver smelting and lead pipes. According to a recent study, however, lead is a much more ancient nemesis, one that predates not just the Romans but the existence of our genus Homo. Paleoanthropologist Renaud Joannes-Boyau of Australia’s Southern Cross University and his colleagues found evidence of exposure to dangerous amounts of lead in the teeth of fossil apes and hominins dating back almost 2 million years. And somewhat controversially, they suggest that the toxic element’s pervasiveness may have helped shape our evolutionary history…

…But perhaps its most interesting feature is that modern humans have a version of the gene that differs by a single amino acid from the version found in all other primates, including our closest relatives, the Denisovans and Neanderthals. This raises the prospect that the difference is significant from an evolutionary perspective. Altering the mouse version so that it is identical to the one found in modern humans does alter the vocal behavior of these mice.

Here’s some new thought technology

How am I just now reading this?? I should OF read it years ago as a teacher…

Would of, could of, might of, must of | Sentence first:

Unstressed ’ve is phonetically identical (/əv/) to unstressed of: hence the widespread misspellings would of, could of, should of, must of, might of, may of, and ought to of. Negative forms also appear: shouldn’t of, mightn’t of, etc. This explanation – that misanalysis of the notorious schwa lies behind the error – has general support among linguists.

R.I.P. Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall, legendary primatologist, has died at age 91 : NPR:

In just a few months, Goodall a made a major discovery. Chimps could make and use tools — as she learned by watching a chimp she’d named David Greybeard. (Goodall has called him “my favorite chimpanzee of all time.”) He stripped leaves off a twig, then used it to fish termites out of a mound. Goodall later told NPR that her mentor, Louis Leakey, was impressed.

“He said, ‘Well, it’s always been considered that man is the only toolmaking animal. So we now have to redefine tool, redefine man, or include chimpanzees with humans,’ ” she recalled.

Civilizations of Africa Review by Eleanor Konik

Wonderful review and reflection here by Eleanor Konik… highly suggest you read:

📚 REVIEW: Civilizations of Africa, A History to 1800:

Back in 2021, I asked the folks at r/AskHistorians for a good primer on African history. One of the moderators recommended The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 by Christopher Ehret. I got it from the library and took extensive notes. I regret not just buying a copy from Amazon (affiliate link) because it’s probably the reference note1 I look back at most often. A friend of mine asked me to write a review for it, and I’ve been meaning to put my thoughts together and really process these notes in a high-level way for years, so let’s go.

Caligula as a Pharmacology Nerd

We still have lots to learn from the ancients… I’m hoping AI will help us process some of the lessons we’ve forgotten over the millennia, particularly with pharmacology…

Ancient Rome’s Most Notorious Emperor Was Also a Medicine Nerd, New Study Reveals (art net):

Conventional wisdom suggests Caligula was a madman, hence the apocryphal story of appointing his horse as a senator. But despite his character, and questionable sanity, Caligula was also man of great intellect and learning with a particularly keen knowledge of pharmacology. This is the conclusion of Andrew Koh and Trevor Luke, faculty in the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program, who have delved into the unflattering histories concerning Caligula and found an Emperor who knew his medicinal plants.

Dead Sea Scrolls and AI

Fascinating (and much needed) work here on texts that still have much to teach us…

Many of Dead Sea scrolls may be older than thought, experts say | Archaeology | The Guardian:

“Overall, this is an important and welcome study, and one which may provide us with a significant new tool in our armoury for dating these texts,” he said. “Nevertheless, it’s one that we should adopt with caution, and in careful conjunction with other evidence.”

Origins of Human Use of Fire? 🔥

Lately, I’ve been thinking and writing about human uses and conceptions of fire in relation to liturgy, language, and ecologies. Research such as this about early uses of fire as technology (and I would include language, spirituality, and mythologies in there) has fascinated me recently as a result…

Stone age BBQ: How early humans may have preserved meat with fire:

Prof. Barkai explains, “The origins of fire use is a ‘burning’ topic among prehistory researchers around the world. It is generally agreed that by 400,000 years ago, fire use was common in domestic contexts—most likely for roasting meat, and perhaps also for lighting and heating.

“However, there is controversy regarding the preceding million years, and various hypotheses have been put forward to explain why early humans began using fire. In this study, we sought to explore a new perspective on the issue.”

Anglo-Saxons Fought in Syria and Iraq

Anglo-Saxons may have fought in northern Syrian wars, say experts | Archaeology | The Guardian:

“These finds put the Anglo-Saxon princes and their followers centre-stage in one of the last great wars of late antiquity. It takes them out of insular England into the plains of Syria and Iraq in a world of conflict and competition between the Byzantines and the Sasanians and gave those Anglo-Saxons literally a taste for something much more global than they probably could have imagined.

It adds an international dimension to those sites. We have looked at the Anglo-Saxons in a rather insular manner.”

Rome’s Colosseum as a Garden

Beautiful thoughts here about modern architecture…

Rome’s Colosseum Was Once a Wild, Tangled Garden – The Atlantic:

Plants growing today in the Colosseum include very rare species like Asphodelus fistulosus and Sedum dasyphyllum, which scientists believe can only survive when sheltered by the arena, a sanctuary from the urban environment outside. Due to increased pollution and the rising temperature of the city, the flora inside the ruined walls are beginning to change: Plants suited to a warmer and more arid climate are beginning to proliferate at the expense of those more used to cool and damp.

Inside a Genius Mind: Leonardo’s Notebooks

Amazing web app here (bottom link to direct Google Experiment) focused on major themes in Leonardo’s notebooks and connecting them with machine learning. I’m a huge fan of notebooks, and I use the example of Leonardo keeping his thoughts in them all the time with my own students.

If you’re like me and really into Leonardo’s “notebooking” practices and history, I highly suggest you check out the videos Adam Savage has done on his Tested YouTube channel. Wonderful and inspiring videos. May we all find something that moves us in such a way!

Leonardo da Vinci: Inside a genius mind post:

From the stages of his life to dispelling myths, and examining his masterpieces up close, everyone can delve into Leonardo’s mind as we’ve brought together for the first time 1,300 pages from his collections of volumes and notebooks. The codices, brimming sketches, ideas, and observations, offer a window into the boundless imagination of one of history’s greatest polymaths. With the aid of Machine Learning and the curatorial expertise of Professor Martin Kemp, the accompanying experiment also called “Inside a Genius Mind” unravels these intriguing and sometimes mysterious materials.

Full experiment here!

Hauntology and Valhalla

Like many who went through college and then grad-school in the religion / literature / philosophy circles, I’ve read and pondered my share of Derrida and the consequences of ontology on our “demon-haunted world” … another reason I’ve absolutely loved playing AC Valhalla (about 125 hours in at this point since picking it up over the Holidays).

A pun coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the early ’90s, hauntology refers to the study of nonexistence and unreality (so the opposite of ontology). Contemporary philosopher Mark Fisher makes extensive use of this concept, describing hauntology in his book The Weird and Eerie as “the agency of the virtual … that which acts without (physically) existing.”

For me, there’s no greater example of this than in Valhalla’s ruins. While open-world games are often dominated by landscape, mirroring the history of art where scenic oil paintings—once considered inferior—grew into a position of relative dominance, the ruin has seen a similar ascendency. Just as Romantic poets mulled over the allure of rivers and mountains, a passion for ancient ruins bloomed too, with painters like J. M. W. Turner and John Constable touring Britain in search of architectural wreckage among the rolling hills.

— Read on www.wired.com/story/assassins-creed-valhalla-eerie-english-landscapes/

Where is the Salvator Mundi?

The painting has been described as a devotional counterpart to the Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s most famous work, and is said to have an “extraordinary, communicative presence”. But Lewis, the author of the acclaimed book The Last Leonardo, explains why questions remain about its origin. Last year the painting did not appear in the Louvre’s blockbuster Leonardo exhibition, prompting widespread speculation and the question: where is Salvator Mundi?

Source: Leonardo da Vinci and the mystery of the world’s most expensive painting | News | The Guardian

Chalk Apocalypse

So, when Hagoromo announced that it was going out of business in 2014, it caused a rupture in the math community.”

I referred to it as a chalk apocalypse,” Conrad said. In a panic, mathematicians across America began stockpiling resources in preparation.”

I calculated how many boxes I would need to last 10 to 15 years and I bought that many boxes,” says Lieblich.Dave Bayer took things even further. “I single-handedly bought the rest of the Amazon supply in the middle of the night,” he said.

Source: How a brand of chalk achieved cult status among mathematicians – CNN

I was gifted with an old sliding blackboard in my 2nd year of teaching (and my first year of teaching Physical Science). I loved that board and was sad to leave it later in my career when I went to a new school.

There’s something special about chalk covered hands and the feel of writing on a blackboard to make a point about F=MA or the structure of an atom.

Now I want to go stock up on some Hagoromo and find a good blackboard for my children.

Chernobyl on the Seine

In 1933 nuclear physicist Marie Curie had outgrown her lab in the Latin Quarter in central Paris. To give her the space needed for the messy task of extracting radioactive elements such as radium from truckloads of ore, the University of Paris built a research center in Arcueil, a village south of the city. Today it’s grown into a crowded ­working-class suburb. And the dilapidated lab, set in an overgrown garden near a 17th century aqueduct, is sometimes called Chernobyl on the Seine.

Source: France Is Still Cleaning Up Marie Curie’s Nuclear Waste – Bloomberg

Don’t think that we can’t remember

When undergraduate students at Peking University, which was at the center of the incident, were shown copies of the iconic photograph 16 years afterwards, they were “genuinely mystified”. One of the students said that the image was “artwork”. It is noted in the documentary Frontline: The Tank Man that he whispered to the student next to him “89”, which led the interviewer to surmise that the student may have concealed his knowledge of the event.

via Tank Man – Wikipedia

Roman Earthquake Cloaking

I tend to agree with the physicist from UNCC here that the Colosseum and other buildings that exhibit these “metamaterial” designs were probably self-selecting (in that they didn’t fall down during earthquakes), but we definitely don’t give the ancients enough credit with their engineering and scientific prowess…

Scientists are hard at work developing real-world “invisibility cloaks” thanks to a special class of exotic manmade “metamaterials.” Now a team of French scientists has suggested in a recent preprint on the physics arXiv that certain ancient Roman structures, like the famous Roman Colosseum, have very similar structural patterns, which may have protected them from damage from earthquakes over the millennia.

via Ars Technica

New Reading of the Mesha Stele

Potentially huge (I appreciate Thomas Römer‘s scholarship a great deal):

A name in Line 31 of the stele, previously thought to read ‘House of David’, could instead read ‘Balak’, a king of Moab mentioned in the biblical  of Balaam (Numbers 22-24), say archaeologist Prof. Israel Finkelstein and historians and biblical scholars Prof. Nadav Na’aman and Prof. Thomas Römer, in an article published in Tel Aviv: The Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University.

New reading of Mesha Stele could have far-reaching consequences for biblical history – Phys.org

It’s not like Caligula didn’t have some warning…

Between the laughing statue, God kicking me with his toe, and the flamingo incident, I might have considered a course correction in my life’s path had I been in Caligula’s shoes…

While the statue of Olympian Jupiter was being dismantled before removal to Rome at his command, it burst into such a roar of laughter that the scaffolding collapsed and the workmen took to their heels; and a man named Cassius appeared immediately afterwards saying that he had been ordered, in a dream, to sacrifice a bull to Jupiter. The Capitol at Capua was struck by lightning on the Ides of March, which some interpreted as portending another imperial death; because of the famous murder that had taken place on that day. At Rome, the Palace doorkeeper’s lodge was likewise struck; and this seemed to mean that the Owner of the Palace stood in danger of attack by his own guards. On asking Sulla the soothsayer for his horoscope, Gaius learned that he must expect to die very soon. The Oracle of Fortune at Antium likewise warned him: ‘Beware of Cassius!’ whereupon, forgetting Chaerea’s family name, he ordered the murder of Cassius Longinus, Governor of Asia at the time. On the night before his assassination he dreamed that he was standing beside Jupiter’s heavenly throne, when the God kicked him with a toe of his right foot and sent him tumbling down to earth. Some other events that occurred on the morning of his death were also read as portents. For instance, blood splashed him as he was sacrificing a flamingo; Mnester danced the same tragedy of Cinyras that had been performed by the actor Neoptolemus during the Games at which King Philip of Macedonia was assassinated; and in a farce1 called Laiireo1i~s, at the close of which the leading character, a highwayman, had to die while escaping and vomit blood, the understudies were so anxious to display their proficiency at dying that they flooded the stage with blood. A nocturnal performance by Egyptians and Ethiopians was also in rehearsal: a play staged in the Underworld.

Source: Suetonius’ Life of Caligula

No One Ever Said It Would Be So Hard

When I was a boy, I was always jealous of my friends who had fathers with a career. Whether it was a tobacco salesman at one of the many warehouses in our small rural town at the time, or whether it was the local attorney or Lance Truck delivery guy… there was something I felt prestigious about having a career with a “real job” attached to your identity. My dad was on track to be an architect before he went to work for himself. I just recently stole a notebook of his drawings from that time before I was born (sorry, Dad). He would mention buildings or features that he designed in his earlier career path as we drove past them on the way to yet another car dealership in the area. We’ve never discussed it, but I always wondered what it would be like to have a dad with a formal career.

Dad has always been the entrepreneurial type and I can’t count the number of other side ventures he’s been involved with to go along with his main profession as a car wholesaler. He’s carried a leather briefcase for most of his life, and I used to sneak extra copies of his evolving business cards to put in my briefcase (which I, unfortunately, didn’t realize was not considered a cool fashion accessory during the first few days of Middle School).

But yet, he created his own job. As did his father. As did my Great Grand Father. Probably further back on down the line if I go check our family history file. There’s something about growing up in a small rural town of just a couple thousand people that makes you create your own path, whether that’s politically or theologically… or career-wise. Our town was full of women and men who were self-starters and “worked for themselves.”

God Helps Those Who Help Themselves could be on the official seal of Mullins, SC.

Perhaps that’s why I coveted a dad with a career in a fancy office building that he’d go off to in a white shirt and tie every morning after we ate corn flakes and he asked me how I liked my teacher and how the homework was going as he read the folded up paper at the breakfast table. Instead, I would see my dad often during the day in his mobile office. That’s what I called his truck. It was always full of papers and industry figures on cars and random tools or car parts. He’d drive up at 11 am or 2 pm or 4 pm while I was outside playing basketball in our yard. We’d exchange quick hello’s then go about our day. He’d drive off again after and I’d see him a few hours later. Dad would also travel to cities with exotic sounding names like Charleston or Savannah or Lumberton or Atlanta. I’d find the cities in our copy of The World Book and try to guess how far they were from Mullins. While he was on these trips, I would often stay up late drawing the logo for the business I was going to create in a big office building in a big town somewhere (hopefully Chicago so that I could go see the Cubs play when things weren’t too busy). I still have a notebook from childhood with a few of those drawings and designs for the invisible company. It was going to be called Harrelson Agency and the logo was a fancy “H” that I lifted from a crystal glass that was in the China cabinet that I wasn’t supposed to ever dare touch (I did).

After I left Mullins for college (where I got to fly on planes and travel overseas) and then graduate school (in another part of the country, even), I moved to Columbia. I had the option to go back home and teach there (in an alternate universe, there’s a very happy and inspired 40 years old AP US History Teacher Sam doing his thing), but we chose Columbia. I ended up in the classroom for a while but was tempted away by what I had always sought… a job in an office.

I stumbled into the marketing agency building here in Columbia on my first day not knowing much of anything about the real profession of marketing. I was good with computers and had a pretty quick wit, so I guess that was good enough to land the job in 2002. I loved the job and the connections I was making with people all around the world even if I was just writing email copy or begging advertisers for money. I bought a home. I had a steady paycheck with a beautiful girlfriend and a dog and I wore a white shirt and tie to work every day. Living the dream, I thought.

Then as the months went by, I started realizing I should be getting more money. I was “Sam Harrelson” after all. I was important to the company. I should get at least a commission on these big deals I was landing, right? I was 25 and knew everything.

I even considered becoming a registered Republican. As those thoughts entered my mind, I quickly realized it was time for my next career step. That’s what a career is, right? It’s a series of vertical movements until you hit a “Chief” position where there’s no one to tell you what to do. So I made vertical moves over the next few years until I realized enough was … well … enough. And I walked away from the office job with the white shirt and tie. I walked away from that career. I ended up back in a classroom.

Teaching wasn’t just a job for me. It was and is my true passion. I don’t know why. Some people love jumping out of airplanes. Some people love selling makeup. I love teaching. I’ll teach anything (just give me an hour to brush up beforehand). My partner has become accustomed to my dinner table mini-lessons on the newest star formation in the Orion constellation or how Egyptian mummification techniques changed rapidly in the late Ptolemaic period, or why 2 Samuel’s depiction of Uriah is so damning today. She handles me with grace.

Over the course of 8 years as a professional teacher, I taught 11th grade American literature, 8th-grade science, 8th-grade robotics, 8th-grade algebra, 7th-grade pre-algebra, 7th-grade science, 7th grade US History, 7th grade English, and 6th-grade Design Tech along with many summer camp courses. I worked with students to launch a balloon into space (well, upper atmosphere… close enough) and we made the TV news and front page of the local paper. The students had a copy framed for me, and it still hangs on my “office” wall (more on that in a second). I just knew I was going to be a teacher forever.

Then as the years went by, I started realizing that I should be getting more money. I was “Sam Harrelson” after all (Well, “Mr. H”). I was important to the school. I should be getting at least a moderate pay bump for all the exposure and social media likes and parent involvement I was generating, right? I was 32 and knew everything.

So I walked away from the classroom with the coffee mugs and bow ties. I walked away from that career. I ended up back in my bedroom.

For the last 8 years, I’ve been carving this Harrelson Agency thing out of marble. Michelangelo might have seen the David in a block of marble that had laid neglected for 26 years in the yard of a Cathedral, but I certainly didn’t have the same privilege with the 26-year-old career block that has been sitting in the corner of my mind. Sculpting this company and this life from that block of hard stone has caused me much psychological and physical and emotional and relationship strife. It’s only now, 8 years after I started chipping, that I realize what I’ve done to myself and what Harrelson Agency has done to me. You could call it the male impetus for chasing “The Great White Whale” or the Concord Fallacy, but I’m not giving it up just yet even though it remains a difficult beast to direct and has fits of starts and stops and continuous bucking. We’re conjoined now. I’ve engendered it with life and meaning and kicking it out of the Garden is not a practical resolution to this creation.

I realize, as a Pirate Looks at 40, that I have become very much like my dad. I don’t have a typical office. My truck is my mobile office. I carry a leather briefcase. I’m consistently changing my business card designs. I’m at home during random times of the day, and I get to spend a good deal of time with my children and partner. It’s a good job if you can get it.

Yet, I’ll still put on a white shirt and pair of slacks just to go work at the dining room table or my makeshift office here in our bedroom, which makes no sense. I’m always pulled back to that childhood fear of being a man without a career and when I look at my 10-year-old daughter I wonder now if she has the same thoughts I do. “My mom is a doctor, but what in the hell do I tell people my dad does? Play on the internet all day?” I hope I’m not causing her that anxiety as I work on this marble block. My tools have gotten better, and I have a better sense of how to chip and strike and know when to walk away and leave the block for a day to give us both rest as I work on it and it works on me. I hope she understands that I’m doing this intentionally for her and her sister and her brother and our family.

There’s a Coldplay song (I’m not a Coldplay fan if you’re wondering) titled “The Scientist” that has always pulled my heartstrings. Willie Nelson did an excellent cover of it a few years back and I prefer his version but that’s irrelevant. Having gone through a divorce and having lost people close to me in death, the song of loss and hurt resonates deeply. One of the lines that will pop up in the ever playing jukebox that is my head is:

No one said it was easy. No one said it would be so hard.

It was a constant partner to me during the divorce and during hard times with Harrelson Agency. I wish my dad would have warned me. Maybe he did, and I’m just now hearing him.

Harrelson Agency has grown every year in client base and income. Now it’s growing in offerings and direction (more on that in a second). Despite that, I’ve tried to walk away from this career a few times. I’ve flirted with a big job in an office high rise downtown with a parking garage and a hierarchical ladder for climbing. I’ve flirted with going back into the classroom. None of those dalliances amounted to me leaving this block behind though. I realize now that what I’ve always been looking for has been right there in the notebook that I created while wondering what my dad was doing. Living in Columbia now and having many friends and acquaintances in the “professional class” here has only ratcheted up that anxiety of not “having a career.” I get asked “So what do you do?” weekly as I’m introduced to parents at our son’s school or meetups or church. “Oh, Communications and PR. Who are you with?” To which I answer “Myself.” I need to start answering “Harrelson Agency… up and coming PR agency here in town. Heard of them?” Imposter syndrome is real, y’all.

What I’ve realized is that Harrelson Agency continues to shift from being a pure “marketing agency” into more of a public relations and communications firm. Marketing is a part of that to be sure, but most of our newer clients don’t need a website or a social media plan and are looking for real strategy and real communications help. We all thought Public Relations as a “career” (more on that in a second) was dead as a doornail in 2005 as the social web was just beginning to flourish and everyone could be their own PR rep.

What we realized is that effective communication, especially online, is a job and a career in and of itself no matter the medium. In our current age, we’re able to use artificial intelligence to create audio and video of anyone saying anything we’d like. Our human brains are still tied to our pre-Paleolithic environment and we’re just now beginning to understand how the brain “sees” and “hears” scientifically. But good luck explaining that to an angry Facebook user who saw the video of you saying something you didn’t say, or the angry Twitter person calling you out for a snippet of audio in your voice but not from your mouth. We’re entering dangerous, but exciting, times. I want to be more a part of that conversation as it relates to what I love doing with nonprofits and religious organizations marketing-wise, but also in the political realm. Not a full-on change, but a slight pivot to keep up with the times and my passion and the tools I have on hand to work on this block.

What I’ve realized is that my dad has had a great career that he sculpted himself. I’m proud of him. He is, for all intent and purposes, my role model. I’m still working on this damned marble block, but I’m not letting the cherubim and seraphim have at it just yet with their flaming swords. I’m not condemning it to a life of thistles and thorns. We’re going to make this work, Harrelson Agency, and we’re going to continue to build this career as we hammer it out in the sunshine and in the rain of that cathedral yard.

Running in circles, chasing our tails Coming back as we are

Was Writing Developed by Poets, Priests, our Accountants?

Fun read:

As a writer of nonfiction, I can’t help but love writing’s roots in enumerating concrete objects and reality itself. The textual analyst part of me loves how Mesopotamian tokens were wrapped in clay envelopes after being impressed on the soft exterior – perhaps clay-wrapped tokens of meaning give rise to the notion that text is both a surface and an interior, and that that’s what leads us to talk so relentlessly (in English and other languages) about what is ‘in’ a given text. The poet in me wants to repurpose the heavy thumb of authority’s use of writing on behalf of the powerless. The linguist in me recognises the cognitive significance of the layers of writing’s invention, none of which the brain was evolved to do specifically but with which we have co-evolved. And as a partisan of text, I know its deep history won’t ever be erased.

— Read on aeon.co/essays/the-roots-of-writing-lie-in-hopes-and-dreams-not-in-accounting

Introducing the Assyrians

 

Layard’s discoveries caused a media sensation and captured the public imagination. This had a major impact on painting and applied arts, in the UK and beyond, during the second half of the nineteenth century, which led to a brief phase of ‘Assyrian revival’. The Assyrian sculptures at the British Museum largely remain today where they were first installed over 160 years ago.

Source: Introducing the Assyrians – The British Museum Blog

My work, Asia Has Claims Upon New England: Assyrian Reliefs at Yale, covers the American reaction (primarily northeastern colleges meant to educate ministers such as Yale, Harvard, Williams, Union Seminary, Amherst etc) to “Assyriamania.”

The British Museum has an incredible collection of Assyrian artifacts, as does the Metropolitan Museum in New York. However, these small (at the time) colleges were also collecting Assyrian reliefs not just for academic study or curiosity but to prove a point about the Bible to the young men they were training for a life in the ministry.

It’s a fascinating story and I hope to revisit it and do more exploration into the missionary-minded impetus behind collecting and displaying these archaeological (and theological) pieces.

—

Btw, in “Asia Has Claims…,” I was able to work with Prof. Samuel Paley to produce a computer animation (way back in 2001) that more accurately depicted what the throne room of Ashurnasirpal II’s palace would have looked like (the one drawn in the 19th cent for Layard that’s at the top of this post was waaaaay off).