Marcus Aurelius advised retreating into oneself, for nowhere does a man withdraw more quietly
Marcus Aurelius advised retreating into oneself, for nowhere does a man withdraw more quietly. In the digest, for my part, I try to gather what has been published over the month while the memories are still fresh. So, the main things on the channel for August.
The section on archaeology and the origins of man 🧑🏻🔬 proved a fruitful one this month. Trinity College read smallpox genomes from the remains of colonial Chile: the Columbian exchange is now proven genetically. The Denisovan turned out to be 180-190 centimetres tall, which has shaken Bergmann's rule. Zurich and Busan digitised the pelvises of four Neanderthals and closed the myth of the difficult births of Neanderthal women. Near the village of Chleby in Central Bohemia a circular enclosure with twelve entrances laid out on a solar-lunar scheme was excavated, older than Stonehenge by a thousand years. In the Phaleron necropolis near Athens, 79 men with shackled wrists turned out to be 97% local. And near Suzdal a tenth-century chamber burial was found with a horse, a dog, a battle axe and scales for weighing coin.
Art and its fate 🖼 remains the channel's calling card. Yayoi Kusama has died on 14 August at the age of ninety-seven; it was announced only on the 26th. Nauman has brought out a book about the affair of Duchamp and Maria Martins. At the Tretyakov Gallery on Kadashevskaya Embankment, quietly, “Flowers” is on, a hundred and fifty works from Kramskoy to Goncharova. In Vancouver a passer-by called the police to rescue a sculpture. While we are at it, let us recall Jacques Jaujard, who evacuated the Louvre in a few days before the war, in furniture vans and ambulances.
Theatre and literature 📖 “The Dowerless Bride” has been transposed into kabuki with a mirror-image distribution of roles: the best thing I have seen in the theatre this year. On 31 August it was eighty-five years since the death of Tsvetaeva, but the place of her burial has still not been established. The Babylonian “Poor Man of Nippur” of 701 BC is about a threefold revenge for stingy hospitality.
Restoration and heritage 🏛 The US Department of Justice has declared that, without repairs, the Kennedy Center will have to be demolished and an amphitheatre with a view of the Potomac built in its place. The Polytechnic Museum in Moscow has been closed for thirteen years, with no dates for reopening. In the apartment house on Burdenko Street Kandinsky's tower studio has been opened.
Market and money 💰 The Villena Treasure, ten kilograms of thirteenth-century BC gold, was carried out of the museum in four minutes. Two days later, in the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, a display case was smashed with a hammer and a Van Cleef & Arpels necklace of 673 diamonds, made for Queen Nazli, was taken. The Guggenheim is suing over a Picasso stolen in Pittsburgh in 1961 and resurfacing in 2023.
Church and power ⛪️ Leo XIV warned against faith by hearsay and against the habit of acting as things have always been done, addressing this, this time, to the Church itself. The Greek nomocanon equates summoning sorcerers to cast spells against a person with murder.
Empires and knowledge 🏰 The mechanics of Soviet elections: the sole candidate had to be struck out, so entering the booth signified dissent, while those who agreed went straight to the ballot box. Fees for the senior classes and universities in the USSR were abolished only from 1 September 1956. The Faroes Russia might have acquired three times and never did, like Malta and Hawaii. The Japanese mission of 1880 brought back from Qajar Iran engravings in which the chador is likened to the katsuki. The painted pottery of the Qurayya oasis circulated across Arabia and the Levant for a thousand years with a stable set of features, which makes it the first trademark in history.
Science and its mores 🦸🏽 The Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka has been accused of manipulating images, while the accuser, the Gotham foundation, had opened a short position in advance on the shares of the sponsors of his centre. In the Sverdlovsk Region, viewing a sheet of an archival file online now costs 11 roubles 73 kopecks, whereas Perm, Samara and Vologda charge nothing. In Ireland, for forty years the bones from Ferriter's Cove were considered the earliest domestic cow, until collagen analysis showed a bear. It has emerged that Egyptian blue required a control of kiln temperature that was achieved only in later metallurgical traditions.
Nature and history 🌿 In the Ile-Balkhash reserve the tigress Ümit was released, the first tiger in the wild in Kazakhstan in seventy years. Pavlov, in August 1935, half a year before his death, put up a monument to a nameless dog and composed the inscriptions on the bas-reliefs himself
