Ummagumma

Since I watched videos pertaining to my recent post , there has been sooooo much Göbekli Tepe clickbait in my YouTube feed lately. "The world's oldest temple." "The mysterious sanctuary that rewrites human history." Then a thumbnail appears showing some ancient limestone pillar next to an ominous-looking guy pointing at it like he just found proof that the Neolithic had Wi-Fi. It is mostly bullshit. Maybe Göbekli Tepe was a temple site. No one knows. That is the first thing to say. There is no surviving text. No named god. No prayer. No priestly rulebook. No account of what people thought they were doing there. No carved little sign saying, "Welcome to the Temple of the Great Fox. Please leave your offering at the front desk." There are, however, enormous limestone pillars. There are animals everywhere. There are lots of animal bones. There are some human remains, though the site does not appear to be a cemetery or a place where people we...

In July 2024 I wrote two posts about Sudan (see here and here ). The war had already run more than a year. Khartoum was being destroyed. Darfur was returning to the ethnic killing that made its name infamous twenty years ago. Millions displaced. Hunger spreading. Hospitals collapsing. The death estimate then: somewhere around 13,000 to 15,000, mostly civilians. Almost no one in the West was talking about it. Still isn't. Yet it was already one of the worst situations on earth. Ukraine became a war of attrition. Gaza took the headlines. Then the Israeli-US-Iran war. Israel has a special relationship with America. Sudan does not. South Sudan does not. Chad does not. Ethiopia does not. Some places become catastrophe as an ongoing fact rather than an event. Nobody denies it's happening. They just don't look. I read a piece this morning titled " Sudan: The Deadliest War You're Not Hearing About. " A little dramatic for my taste. But the point stands. Sudan'...

A small part of  Göbekli Tepe with the viewing platform at its edge. There's a place in southern Turkey, on a limestone ridge, that shatters entire worldviews. This is undeniably something we can put our hands on. Human beings made this place circa 11,000 years ago. Other than late-paleo cave paintings, this is the oldest human stuff we can physically touch. Göbekli Tepe . The name means "potbelly hill." The site predates Stonehenge by 6,000 years. The Great Pyramid of Giza by 7,000. Everything scientists “understood” about the origins of organized human society — the clean progression from agriculture to settlement to religion to monuments — this place inverts it. First came the gathering. Then came everything else. That's unsettling in a specific way. The old story was comforting. It told us civilization was a logical climb. First you feed yourself reliably, then you can afford to think bigger. The monument comes last, as a kind of reward for having organized your...

I sat down yesterday afternoon just to quickly check the news and see if anything major was happening. I was shocked by the reports I was reading. We seem to be witnessing something that has not happened in modern Western history since 1986: an overt attempt by the United States, alongside Israel, to kill the sitting head of a sovereign state. Not a militia commander. Not a transnational jihadist. Not a general operating in the gray zone between war and proxy conflict. A head of state embedded in the constitutional and theological architecture of a recognized country. The last comparable moment was 1986, when the United States struck Libya and targeted Muammar Gaddafi. He survived. Since then, Western powers have toppled regimes through invasion and attrition, but they have not openly executed a decapitation strike against a sovereign leader. Saddam Hussein fell after a ground invasion and regime collapse. Gaddafi died in the chaos of civil war. Osama bin Laden was not a head of sta...

It is great to be alive in a time when outstanding history is still being written. The second volume of David A. Powell’s massive telling of the 1864 Atlanta Campaign came out in October. I bought it about a week after its released and read it soon thereafter. I tore through the 587 pages in about ten days, making lots of notes. I’ve been pondering it off and on ever since. Powell’s first volume was superb and this one upholds the same high standard with refreshing insights and fascinating new facts to what has been for me a lifelong interest. What I have learned from Powell in Volume 2: From the Etowah River to Kennesaw Mountain, May 20 – June 27, 1864 has provided me with a much clearer understanding of this part of the campaign, though I don’t necessarily agree with the author on everything. For newcomers, I think the Atlanta Campaign is the single most important campaign of the War Between the States, for reasons I have covered before. Suffice it to say that if Atlanta d...

Under remarkable wartime conditions, this is the Leningrad premiere of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 on August 9, 1942.  To look at these people you would not know that all of them, without exception, are malnourished and under German artillery fire.  The orchestra itself fought fatigue to be able to learn and then perform the massive work of defiance dedicated by the composer to the city itself.   I recently completed Prit Buttar's excellent two-volume history of the Siege of Leningrad. I was struck by much in the books, but nothing of a non-military nature surpassed the extraordinary story of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony as described by Buttar in To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941-1942 . It's one of those intersections of history and art so improbable that it almost feels like myth, except that it happened among bombings, starvation, and bureaucratic terror. Shostakovich had already been through his own siege long before the Germans arrived. In the 1930s, Stal...