NB! · Archive · The East · Observations · Mores · Humour

I Cannot Decide Which Number at This Ball-Concert in Grozny Is the More Interesting: the Eccentric Negro Dance "Elly", the Ryazan Peasant Women with Their Chastushki, "Jealousy" as Performed by Sofya, or the Jazz Imitation of Domestic Animals, "The Piglet

NB! · Faith · The East · Observations · People

All the same, humanity would probably have come out ahead had the young Joseph become a priest in Georgia

NB! · The East

Damascus, 1677

NB! · The East · Art

Russian Troops Take Samarkand

Russian troops take Samarkand. Nikolai Karazin, 1868

The East · Monarchies · Observations · Mores

Eleanor of Aquitaine, the chess queen and the widening of the queen's moves

When in chess the Ferz, meaning vizier, is called the Queen, this alludes to Eleanor of Aquitaine, mother of Richard the Lionheart, who is often named as the initiator of the chess reform that changed the name of the ferz. The photograph shows a chess figure of a queen from

Archaeology · The East · Science

The megalithic complex of Göbekli Tepe in Anatolia, between 9,000 and 12,000 years old

Göbekli Tepe in South-Eastern Anatolia is considered the oldest of the large megalithic structures in the world, its age estimated at 12 to 9 thousand years. The building of temples on this site began as early as the Mesolithic, which attests to the existence of a highly organised society

NB! · Archaeology · The East

The Seal of Cyrus the Great

NB! · Archive · The East · Geography · People

The American traveller, explorer and photographer Harriet Chalmers Adams in the Gobi Desert

Faith · The East · Geography

All seven churches, the seven golden candlesticks named in the Apocalypse of John the Divine, lie in present-day Turkey

"..what thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea."

The East · Society · People

Ali Kemal Bey, ancestor of Boris Johnson and minister in the Ottoman government of 1919

Among the famous forebears of Boris Johnson is Ali Kemal Bey, a Turkish opposition politician of the early twentieth century, journalist and public figure, who for a brief time in 1919 even held a ministerial post in the post-war Ottoman government. As minister, he signed the order for the

NB! · The East · Art · People · Rome

Self-Portrait of Horace Vernet in His Studio in Rome after His Return from a Journey through North Africa, 1835

The East · Art · Books · Observations

In the ancient Indian collection of moral instruction, the "Panchatantra", there is a tale of a man who, fleeing a mad camel, leaps into a well where a dragon lies in wait; it turns out that the stones on which he might set his foot are guarded by snakes;

The moral of the parable is that the pulse of life is felt precisely at the moment when a man is escaping certain death and discovers beneath him an infernal abyss, when every element of existence undermines the footing beneath his feet, and the time by which he might cling