Origins: Got Nytt År!

Just Who Decided to Celebrate the Birth of the Year in the Barrenness of Winter? For thousands of years human beings have recognized an essential peculiarity about time: In some ways it behaves linearly, with event following event into infinity; and in some ways it behaves cyclically, with event repeating event in one great cosmic

Origins: Taking Count

It’s not surprising that one of our principal public rituals, the census, goes back to the Romans By Clifford Ando Every ten years there’s a rumbling in Washington. The machinery of government begins to churn, and soon people with notebooks are scurrying about everywhere, trying to take a reckoning of the American body politic. This

Origins: Reasons to Believe

Around the sixth century B.C., the Greeks began to ask why By Richard D. McKirahan It was a tidy way to explain reality. For the early Greeks, the events of the world were caused by the Olympian gods. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena and the rest looked like humans, but they were more beautiful, they never

Origins: History’s History

Learning to distinguish fact from fancy By Richard H. Beal History, we often say, begins with the written word. What comes before writing is prehistory. The world’s first historians—that is, people who record actual events in a detailed manner—were the Hittites, a kingdom that controlled much of Anatolia in the second millennium B.C. The earliest

Why We Wrote E Books

We have talked to several people about representing our e-books through Amazon’s affiliate program and the gist of their response was that most people they knew dealt in physical products not electronic ones. That is understandable as their customers want to hold something in their hands once they spend their money. The last word in

Our Books Are Now At Amazon

It took a while to get done as Amazon rejected our other publisher’s attempts to list our books on this marketplace. Now you can enjoy our books through Amazon’s website. They are only available on Kindle right now. We will be working on adding a paperback version later this week but no promises. The last

Origins: One, Two…Three

Human beings learned to count at the same time that the Mesopotamian city-states were developing. Was it just a coincidence? By Denise Schmandt-Besserat It seems to be the most basic human skill. We do it when submitting manuscripts to grouchy editors, shopping at the supermarket, and choosing sides for a ball game. It turns out,

Origins: On the Pill

Even William’s Pink Pills for Pale People and Bayer Aspirin have ancestors in the ancient world By George B. Griffenhagen As soon as man began to write, it seems, he was giving medical advice. Prescriptions and formulas are plentiful in the literature of ancient Mesopotamia. One cuneiform tablet suggests the following for an undisclosed ailment: “Pulverize the

Origins: Signs of Life

We are starting a new series for the next few posts on the topic of Origins. This topic is not about the origin of the earth and universe unless one of the authors has written one. They are posted to encourage  further research on the topics in each of the articles. At no time are

Book Review: After the Flood

If you are an honest historian or simply interested in knowing about the past this is going to be a must-read book for you. Well written and well documented, the author, Bill Cooper, takes his readers back through time to a point where many lost ancient records were well known. These records, according to the