Recent Posts

Salman Rushdie’s Victory City review: a storyteller at the height of his powers

Florian Stadtler, University of Bristol Victory City is an epic chronicle of the rise and fall of Vijayanagar (the capital city of the historic southern Indian Vijayanagara empire), which acquires the name “Bisnaga” through ill-fated attempts at pronunciation by a Portuguese traveller. The story unfolds as a fictional retelling of Bisnaga’s history, premised on the archaeological discovery of the Jayaparajaya, …

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Death and dying: how different cultures deal with grief and mourning

John Frederick Wilson, York St John University Grief is a universal emotion. It’s something we all feel, no matter where we come from or what we’ve been through. Grief comes for us all and as humans who form close relationships with other people, it’s hard to avoid. Studies of grieving brains – be it scans of the brain regions which …

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The 2,700-year-old rock carvings from when Nineveh was the most dazzling city in the world

Sennacherib – his face deliberately damaged in antiquity – presides over captives from the Levantine city of Lachish. British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA Martin Worthington, Trinity College Dublin Archaeologists in northern Iraq, working on the Mashki and Adad gate sites in Mosul that were destroyed by Islamic State in 2016, recently uncovered 2,700-year-old Assyrian reliefs. Featuring war scenes and trees, these …

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