They Won’t Stay Dead!

Greetings, child. Welcome to the Sidgwick Crypt (the spookiest part of the Sidgwick Site because it only exists in your nightmares!). There is indeed a chill wind out tonight. No weather for an innocent young seeker of knowledge such as yourself to be abroad. Pray, take off your cloak. Here, shift aside these old bones and take a seat. I’m sure dear old Moses won’t mind. Now, are you sitting comfortably? Then allow me to give you a supervision the like of which you have never had before. A supervision in dark knowledge, in the arcane magicks of an antique land. A supervision on beings which, like the theories of some scholars (I would never be so indiscreet as to name names), do not know their time has passed. Allow me to initiate you in the mysteries of the un-dead.

If. You. Dare!

Modern Wars and Ancient Sites

Aleppo’s mediaeval souq burns.

Last weekend, after an attack by the Free Syrian Army, fire swept through Aleppo’s fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Souq al-Madina and gutted what had formerly been one of the best-preserved markets of its kind in the Middle East. It’s estimated that between seven hundred and a thousand shops in the UNESCO World Heritage Site have been destroyed. Needless to say, the damage to historic buildings and antiquities pales in comparison to the ongoing human tragedy this war represents, but as a student of history and archaeologist it’s hard not to feel a particular pang of sadness at the destruction of such an irreplaceable piece of Syria’s cultural patrimony.