I Still Hate George Rogers Clark, But Vincennes Has Two Native American Mounds, Only One Of Which I'd Seen Before

Also, Mr. Craft Knife knew I was lonely for my kids and there's nothing that will cheer me up like a national park passport stamp.

And it doesn't hurt that I'm desperate to watch Project Hail Mary on IMAX but we're listening to the book on CD first, and a day trip is a great way to bust through a good three CDs!

So, off to Vincennes!

I've only been to Vincennes, and the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park, once before, on a family day trip way back when the kids were ten and twelve and we were studying the American Revolution. I was in a phase of trying to turn composition books into single-subject journals in which the kids could take notes and record their thoughts and paste documents and write essays. We could then keep the notebooks, and every time we returned to that same subject, the kids could use them for review and then add all their new information. I still think this is an AMAZING idea, but the kids never stopped being horrified by it, so eventually I gave up.

And that's why they now don't remember all their states and capitals or all the original 13 colonies!

Anyway, I was still very much insisting on American Revolution notebooks during this homeschool field trip, and I'm so happy I did (and a little bummed at myself for not holding the line forever) when I can pull out gems like this, written by the older kid as a travel journal entry after this trip:

This was also the day that I discovered that my 10-year-old could correctly utilize scare quotes!

It's been just almost ten years since that trip, and nothing has changed. The older kid still thinks that all money would best be served by being given to her, the younger kid still strongly emits in every encounter the sentiment implied by scare quotes, and the George Rogers Clark Memorial still sits on top of the site that used to be Fort Sackville:

OT, but why am I genuinely channeling my Pappa in this photo, with my hands shoved into my pockets and my phone on prominent display in the cargo pocket equivalent of a cellphone holster? All I need is a couple of handfuls of coins and keys to jingle.

Random gossip: back in the 1930s, when plans for this building were being made and bids were being taken for the work, the limestone lobby and the granite lobby got into a big fight. The limestone lobby was all, "Yo, The building should obviously be made from Indiana limestone, because INDIANA. Granite isn't even FROM here!"

And then the granite lobby was all, "Yeah, that's awesome if you want your whole building to look like a weathered old gravestone in 30 years. You know what DOESN'T literally dissolve in the rain? GRANITE."

Ultimately, it was decided to do the outside parts in granite and the inside parts in limestone, but then someone found out that the granite they were planning to use was being sourced from Canada (gasp!), and both the limestone lobby AND the granite lobby freaked out. 

Don't worry, y'all. They eventually found enough US granite to complete the project and peace was restored.

I know the people of the early 1900s were allllllll about their huge granite memorials (see: Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park), but I far prefer the historical recreation school of thought (see Fort Necessity National Battlefield). Instead of a huge monument right where Fort Sackville used to be, wouldn't you prefer a life-sized recreation of Fort Sackville? 

At least they can't take away the river across which Clark and his "army" (lol, that kid!) sneaked... although they CAN channelize it, it seems!

There's not much of a riparian buffer zone on the east bank, but regular flooding is more historically accurate, I guess:

We walked across the bridge to get a landscape view of the site. There also used to be a French village in the area, but I'm not sure where:

You can kind of imagine a fort right where that big granite monument is!

This is my partner, who literally DROVE US HERE, being disturbingly surprised that we're at the edge of the state:

I was all, "Well, we drove southwest until we got to the Wabash River. What did you think was going to be on the other side?"

He replied, "Um... more Indiana?"

Come on, Dude! The Wabash River is the state river of Indiana! It marks the the southwest border of the state almost all the way up to Terre Haute, and then somehow manages to wrap around Indiana and end up on the other side of the state in Ohio! There have been songs written about it and how it's literally right here! One of those songs is literally the Indiana state song!

Ten years ago, I would have smugly informed him that he was welcome to join our homeschool anytime. On this day, however, I had to just let a smug look suffice.

This church isn't original to the site, but the cemetery is, and it's the site of the original church:

I feel a lot of sympathy for the French citizens of the original town, who probably spent all day, every day, swearing allegiance back and forth to whoever had happened to wrest temporary control over the fort next door.

I don't feel any sympathy for any widower who names his dead wife as his "consort" on her tombstone:

It's apparently just the term they used on a headstone when the wife predeceased the husband, but you and I both know good and well that's so the dude could marry again five minutes later and not have to worry about a whole string of "wife" headstones tagging along behind him. You only get to be his "wife" when he dies first, because that's the only way you wouldn't get supplanted!

This headstone, however, is lovely:

You do have to ignore the apostrophe error, though. I'm too lazy to look up when punctuation was completely standardized, but I'm pretty confident this would have always been wrong. It's a plural, not a possessive!

To the memorial!

I don't know if y'all know about my lord and savior Baumgartner Restoration, but his videos are AMAZING and will cause you to become weirdly invested in art restoration, to such an extent that when you walk into a building and see old-looking art, you'll ask the nearest park ranger about what restoration looks like for that art.

And then he'll tell you, because park rangers are also amazing!

I learned that these are not actually murals, but canvases painted in a warehouse and then installed here using marouflage. The park ranger even pointed out a couple of place where you could see some wrinkling where the canvas hadn't adhered smoothly. He also mentioned this canvas that had been revised, because from the viewing angle it originally looked like that one prone soldier on the right was aiming at George Rogers Clark, lol!

The park ranger and I yapped so much that this poor dude eventually had to sit down and dissociate, lol:

He got his revenge, though, because later he left me standing by the bathrooms, wondering where on earth he was, while he'd actually wandered off to have a whole entire conversation about these Art Deco bronze embellishments with that same park ranger!

How do you end up with the Zodiac on an American Revolution memorial?

Art Deco!

My absolute favorite component is the corn:

I also like George Rogers Clark, his nose polished because that's where everyone touches him:

Fun fact: the memorial is literally falling apart, with the original bronze doors collapsing and the skylight starting to fall in and leaks from all over during every rain. There's no way to get the money to repair it, though, because Trump cut funding to the national parks. Who needs to preserve our national legacy when we can instead have a dictator's private army of jackbooted thugs committing human rights violations on our streets? 

At this point, I need to tell you that other than the Jackbooted Thug in Chief, Mr. Craft Knife and I are the dumbest fucks on the planet. To reiterate, this is the George Rogers Clark memorial:

There's a set of steps to get into the inside, and then a covered area all the way around that colonnade, and then another paved area below that enclosed by that middle wall. The bottom wall just has landscaping inside of it. 

To our credit(?), each of these areas is expansive, and it's unclear--if you're a dumb fuck, at least!--where any additional points of egress might be.

So when Mr. Craft Knife and I, busily yapping our heads off to each other, left the building, walked down a set of steps, and turned right, we found ourselves walking around the entire building via that colonnade. We kept expecting there would be another set of steps down, but nope! We walked around, spying the visitor center we wanted to go to in the distance, continued around, admired the river, and eventually circled back to the first set of stairs we saw, which we now noticed continued down another flight.

"Lol, us!" we said, walked down that flight of stairs, and turned right to go to the visitor center.

It wasn't until we saw--and then passed--it in the distance that we realized we were on that paved area below the memorial that was also elevated and walled off. But surely there would be another set of stairs HERE! Nope! There goes the river for the second time! Hello again, statue of Francis Vigo, namesake of Vigo County!

Eventually we reached, yes, that exact same set of stairs again, and noticed that oh, right, it continues down ANOTHER FUCKING FLIGHT.

Finally, we managed to conquer the world's easiest escape room, and could go get my passport stamp!

That's 34 down, and 399 to go!

Burrito and margarita break:

Now, onto the mounds!

There's a lot of conflicting information about Sugarloaf Mound and Pyramid Mound, and it's not immediately clear what information is authoritative. This webpage, for instance, names Pyramid Mound but has photos and driving direction for Sugarloaf Mound, making it unclear which mound the descriptions refer to. The Wikipedia page for Pyramid Mound also shows photos of Sugarloaf Mound. The Megalithic Portal site has accurate info on its page about Sugarloaf Mound, but its page about Pyramid Mound... also shows an image of Sugarloaf Mound, sigh.

Here's what's written about Sugarloaf Mound in the 1911 History of Old Vincennes:

Fortunately, a study of Sugar Loaf Mound was done in 1998. It found that Sugar Loaf Mound is natural--it's essentially a sand dune formed from all the silt/loess blowing around after the glaciers receded. The "red altar clays" are a misidentification, but there was significant human activity on the mound, as this study found human bones and chert in the core samples. The author theorizes that the mound was used as a "cemetery" by the Late Woodland peoples. The Woodlands people just loved burying each other on top of nice knolls! This article said they'd sometimes build artificial burial mounds, too, but those were pretty small--what they really liked is a nice, tall mound that was already there for them. So now I'm wondering if they'd also take advantage of the super old Mound Builder-era mounds and also pop some of their corpses in. Or maybe they thought that these mounds WERE from the Mound Builder era, since they look so similar!

You certainly can't beat the view from the top:

...and of course I've got my hands in my pockets again:

I made my partner walk alll the way down by himself so he could take a photo of me looking tiny at the top. It's not every day that you get to stand on top of a mound!

Just between us, it's a little less exciting when it's not an earthwork that was built by the ancient peoples, but if they thought it was special, then so do I.

Although the author of "The Geomorphology of Sugar Loaf Mound" didn't also sample Pyramid Mound, he theorizes that it's also natural, since it has the same shape and is in a similar geographic situation that could have resulted in the same type of dune formation. A previous excavation of that mound uncovered more human burials and a piece of the fancy Yankeetown pottery. This sign said that the human remains were repatriated but the pottery lives at Grouseland, the historic home of that asshole William Henry Harrison.

Notice the signage is explicitly calling the mound natural, but as far as I know that hasn't been directly ascertained through core samples or other excavations. But I do think that 1998 Stafford study made a convincing argument!

I've been avoiding paying admission to that bag of dicks' house because I hate him, but I guess now I'll have to!

The whole area of Pyramid Mound is really overgrown, and you probably wouldn't be able to hike it much further into Spring without getting mobbed by ticks:

There's a line of little blue utility flags, though, that mark a trail towards the top, and as you walk it, you can--again, at least this early in the Spring--make out the profile of the mound:

The top of the mound is very overgrown with old trees, but there are also a lot of divots dug deep into the mound, making me wonder if sometimes people sneak up here and do some pothunting:

Sugarloaf Mound is straight ahead in the below photo, and it's actually pretty close. Without the trees in the way, you might even be able to see it from here:

And here's... Jesus Christ, I've got my hand in my pocket AGAIN. I guess my Pappa was really with me that day! 

That's kind of funny, because Pappa would have HAAATED a day trip to mosey around American Revolution crap and big piles of dirt. HIS Special Interest was the Wild West!

P.S. Want more obsessively-compiled lists of resources and activities for geology buffs, history nerds, and lovers of handicrafts? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Want to Have Nightmares for a Week? Read This Book about the Johnstown Flood

Last December, the big kid and I fulfilled her childhood Junior Ranger dream of stopping by the Johnstown Flood National Memorial on the way to pick her little sister up from college. The sun was setting as we walked around the site of the former Lake Conemaugh, just east of the former South Fork Dam. In the distance is the former Unger homestead, with the national park site's visitor center next to it.

The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Johnstown Flood was an absolute literal living nightmare OMG. This book was so scary that I actually had to put it down for the night a couple of different times, because reading about such abject terror and such mass destruction does not make for easy slumber.

McCullough really leans into the terror, too, with lots of retellings of harrowing first-person accounts--I just wish that he’d included footnotes, because I’d be interested in sourcing and reading some of these for myself as a way to honor the victims.

The Johnstown Flood National Memorial Visitor Center contains this terrifying display of what flood survivor Victor Heiser experienced. At just sixteen, his last memory of his father was him standing in their home's second-story window, gesturing for Victor to get back in the barn. Victor obeyed, and climbed through the barn's brand-new trapdoor to the roof, an innovation that his father had recently installed for no particular reason. From his viewpoint on the barn roof, he saw his family home crushed by the flood, and then the barn came unmoored and Victor had to stay on top of it while it raged down the river. He was his family's only survivor.

I love that McCullough especially highlighted the heroes of the story--the train engineer who essentially raced the flood, blowing his whistle to give the residents the only warning most of them were to get, the people who stopped in their flight to help others, the rescue and aid workers and private citizens who helped with the cleanup and recovery. I’m still thinking about six-year-old Gertrude Quinn, and the total stranger, Maxwell McAchren, who jumped into the flood not even because he had a way to rescue her, but literally just to be with her. They floated down the raging river until they got close to a house that was still standing at the edge of the water, with other total strangers hanging out the window trying to rescue people. One of the strangers shouted at McAchren to “throw them the baby,” he somehow did so, and a guy named Henry Koch managed to catch her by lunging so far out the window that another guy, George Skinner, had to hold him by the legs. McAchren continued floating down the flooded river alone, but happily he, too, survived.

The sign in the foreground states that we're at the approximate level of Lake Conemaugh before the flood that broke the dam, and to the left is the top of the former South Fork Dam just a few feet higher than the lake level. The dam was also allowed to wear down and sag in the center to make a weak point, and a former owner had disassembled, removed, and sold off the pipes that were previously used to lower the water level. Add to that the fact that the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club blocked the spillway by installing both a bridge and fish guards to keep the fish they'd stocked in the lake from escaping, and the break seems completely inevitable.

Okay, I just discovered that Gertrude Quinn Slater wrote her own book about the Johnstown Flood! I am currently trying to get Internet Archive to generate an epub of it as I write, but I’m sorry to tell you that it’s not going well.

There were a lot fewer flood artifacts than I thought there would be, but this was one of them.

At first, shortly after finishing the book, I was irritated that McCullough didn’t write more about the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club and the consequences the members faced, etc., but I finally got it through my head that this is because… there weren’t really any? They just kind of all… got away with criminal negligence? So much for Eat the Rich, I guess!

Here’s the thing that I REALLY do not understand, though--why does everyone not know about this? Why didn’t we study it in school? It would have been a terrific addition to the unit on American Industrialization and the development of factories and classism in the 1800s, etc. I only knew about the flood because my older kid was flat-out obsessed with earning Junior Ranger badges when she was little, and the Johnstown Flood National Memorial was a badge she could earn by mail, so we did our own DIY unit study of it (including a trip to visit our own local dam and spillway--they look sturdy and sound, thank goodness!), and what we learned during that study was so ghastly and shocking and downright bonkers that we’ve never stopped talking about it. And I do not understand why EVERYBODY is not constantly talking about it! It was so famous at the time, and now it’s just… not? In 2137, if we’re not in our full on zombie apocalypse Mad Max era, are people no longer going to remember anything about 9/11? Crazy how the memory of human suffering can just dissipate like that.

We're looking across the former Lake Conemaugh, with the former South Fork Dam to the left. You can also see the creek that was dammed there in the middle.

P.S. View all my reviews.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I'm Going To Find the Lost Loot of KV 55 and Then Join King Tut's Death Cult

visiting a mummy in the Yale Peabody Museum, 2013

Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt by Chris Naunton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the kind of book that I would love to see a large-format, sumptuously illustrated and thoroughly annotated edition of. To be fair, there ARE some illustrations and some annotations, some maps and some diagrams, but in order to fully appreciate the information and process it I would have needed a lot, lot, LOT more. And maybe I’m just a dummy and this book is meant for experts who already know where the Valley of the King is compared to where the Theban necropolis is and where the Great Pyramids are in relation to all that, but I don’t think it is. The cover is too cute to be solely for experts!

Even having to look a lot of stuff up and just wonder about other stuff when I was too lazy to look it up, though, I did get a lot from the book. I thought it was interesting that all the regular folks who buried their loved ones in shallow graves at the edge of the desert were the ones who got it right, because the temperature and the lack of humidity naturally mummify corpses buried in that manner. It’s only because the royalty wanted to put themselves somewhere special that they had to go through all that work to do manually what the elements would have otherwise done for them perfectly well. Like, even in the ancient times people were showing off their wealth by making other people work harder!

At first, I also wanted to feel sorry for the long-ago deceased royalty. Having all that stuff/symbolic stuff around their corpses was super important to them, right, because then that’s the nice stuff they’d have around them in their afterlife? So imagine that you’ve done your nice burial and you have all your nice, sumptuous things around you and you’re having an absolutely awesome afterlife, but then all of a sudden your shit just starts disappearing, because back on earthside some grave robbers have discovered your tomb!

Tutankhamun, who in this book is hilariously described as the Benjamin Harrison of pharaohs, probably thought he had it MADE in the afterlife. For thousands of years the bigger, better pharaohs were just walking around naked, all their nice stuff having been stolen or excavated already, while he had ALL his nice stuff. Every single piece! I bet all the other pharaohs laughed their asses off when one day his chariot just disappeared--poof!--out from under him, followed by all his servants, and his cool clothes, and everything else that made the afterlife worth living.

And then he never got any of it back, because his stuff is in a museum and he’s back on display in his tomb!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by best memes (@defibrilator_memes)

Honestly, it all made me kind of wonder if the entire concept of archaeology, excavating these people’s tombs that they deliberately had hidden on purpose, then removing all their nice stuff and displaying it in museums all over the place when their religious practice was to keep it all with their bodies, is actually unethical. I mean, wouldn’t respect for the religious beliefs of these fellow humans require that you NOT unearth and fish out and display all their stuff? How far back in time do you have to go before it’s definitely okay to put a full-on person’s corpse in a museum?

It reminds me of one of my other favorite excavations, Spiro Mounds, and how one of my pet peeves is that we can’t get a good exhibit going of most of the properly acquired stuff (we can still see the looted stuff, of course--there are goods looted from Ancient Native American mounds in the British Museum!) because they’re Native American grave goods and so need permission from the people who make up their descendants, but we don’t know who the descendants of the Spiro Mounds people are so there’s nobody to give permission so we can’t display it. What’s the ethical difference between people whose goods we’re not allowed to display and people whose goods we are? Coolness factor? The fact that one indigenous group was a genocided minority, maybe, and therefore we should be a lot more careful with them now since we were so careless with them previously?

Speaking of unethical acquisition... here's a mummy I visited in the British Museum in 2023!

Ethical or not, I’m super fascinated by the stories of tombs of Egyptian royalty that we know should be around somewhere, but that still have not been found. And Naunton keeps ending chapters by talking about how such and such a place and such and such another place were thought to be likely spots for excavation, but then the archaeologist died or lost their funding or spent the rest of their career working on something else and those spots never did get excavated. Dude, just buy me a plane ticket and book me a guide who speaks the language and *I’LL* go excavating for these lost tombs!

My favorite extracurricular deep dive comes from Naunton’s chapter on “The Missing Amarna Royals.” In it, Naunton tells the story of the excavation of KV 55, including this VERY “intriguing note:”

“The coffin found in KV 55 was lined with several sheets of gold foil, which had become detached from the badly decayed wooden case, and were subsequently kept in storage separately in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum. These subsequently disappeared, but resurfaced on the art market in the 1980s, and were then purchased by two German museums. Those sheets that were part of the original coffin base--by now perished--were restored to a plexiglass substitute, which was repatriated to Egypt in 2001, along with the fragments that had once been attached to the lid.”

First of all: what the HELL, Germany?!? I thought we’d all agreed that you needed to be on your best behavior until the end of time! How does your museums purchasing stolen antiquities accomplish that?

Anyway, I thought that was such a weird thing to have happened, and such a weirdly neutral way to have put it--like, what are you saying by *not* saying it, Naunton?--that obviously I had to dive deeper. And the deeper you dive, the more interesting and weirder KV 55 gets!

 As in, there were a LOT of shenanigans involving its excavation. A LOT of shenanigans, and a lot of those shenanigans were perpetrated by the archaeologist in charge, who should have known better. So I guess much of the mystery surrounding who KV 55 could be, because we still don’t know, is because the archaeologists did such a piss-poor job excavating that they lost and destroyed a lot of important evidence. And then someone(s) on the team stole a bunch of stuff and sold it and that ended up in all kinds of places, and then even stuff in the museum got stolen and sold and ended up in all kinds of places? If you’re looking for your next obsession, there are a LOT of KV 55 conspiracy theories to invest yourself in.

So that’s going to be my next conspiracy theory obsession, I guess. And when I get bored with that, I heard that King Tut might have had a death cult!

P.S. View all my reviews

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Read The Writing of the Gods Because I'm Secretary of the Rosetta Stone Fan Club

My 2023 adventure with the Rosetta Stone!

The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I mentally added this book to my TBR stack while standing in the British Museum gift shop two years ago, and it’s possible that I finally picked it up and dove in exactly two years to the day that I saw the Rosetta Stone in person.

I can’t believe that I waited so long, because it was such a wild and fun ride!

So first, of course, you have to decide if you’re rooting for Young or Champollion. Young is the brilliant child phenom whose mental gifts make him good at everything he sets his mind to, but who cannot seem to set his mind fully to anything. He studied, and then revolutionized, apparently every topic that interested him. He discovered, for instance, how the eyeball sees color, but then buried that information in a boring academic article and promptly moved on to a completely new topic, never following up or progressing it or even really bothering to market it. Some other dude sometime later who was interested in the same subject did a literature review and just happened upon the article in which Young had solved his research problem.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dr. Zahi Hawass (@zahi_hawass)

So sure, Young did discover how to decode some pharaohs’ names in cartouches, but he moved on before he made another single connection. Hell, he didn’t even clock the connection that he’d literally already made--he thought that “reading” the hieroglyphs that way was just a gimmick they’d made up to enable them to transcribe Greek words!

And then you’ve got Champollion. Champollion was still bright, of course, but he wasn’t bright the way that Young was. Young’s brain could have powered the entirety of France if he’d just harnessed it correctly. Champollion, on the other hand, was dedicated. Devoted. This dude PERSEVERED. As a young man, he put his mind to hieroglyphs, and that’s where his mind stayed until the minute he died. The very minute, too, because he was still working on his dictionary on his deathbed. Champollion had a hunch that the Coptic language might not be simply an iteration of Egyptian, but an actual descendent of the Ancient Egyptian language, so he learned the absolute snot out of Coptic. He studied it SO hard and SO long, and this was back when there weren’t a ton of resources. Once upon a time, a visitor to the Vatican Library noted that someone had been marking up a book in Coptic with a pencil, making marginal notes and such. So they did some more digging and discovered that ALL their books in Coptic were similarly marked up! Come to find out that when Napoleon briefly conquered Italy he’d had the Vatican Library transferred to France for a time, and while it was there Champollion had sniffed out all the Coptic language books and read them, and nobody had noticed because nobody else was interested in Coptic.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (@isac_uchicago)

So. Are you rooting for the brilliant but flighty phenom or the dogged academic?

As for me, I’m a Champollion gal.

Dolnick’s description of this race is a really fun part of the book, because who doesn’t love niche drama, but my favorite part of the book is how he makes us understand what it actually is to read hieroglyphs. You’re obviously not going to go off from here and start reading tomb walls, but you do understand how to do it, and the idea of a pictorial language is just so neat.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Manopause (@manopauseman)

Okay, so you’ve got a hieroglyph, and let’s pretend it’s of a cat. The way hieroglyphs work is that yes, a picture of a cat could mean “cat.” OR it could mean a word that’s a homophone of “cat,” as in, “You’ve been out catting around.” OR it could mean a phoneme that’s part of the word for “cat,” like “C is for Cat,” which will then be followed by hieroglyphs that spell the rest of the word. This makes it a really hard language to learn, because you have to learn so many things that could be “cat,” but after you know the language, it’s a really easy language to read, because there are so many ways to read “cat!” It’s like how red means stop, and an octagon means stop, and “STOP” means stop. It took you longer to learn that each of those things meant stop than it would have to learn that just one thing meant stop, but now it’s so easy to know when you’re supposed to stop. And hieroglyphs will stack that meaning, too, by adding an additional hieroglyph that works as a determinative at the end of some words to specify an interpretation, like the silent “e” determinative that tells you the difference between “mop” and “mope.” You have to learn all those hieroglyphs and what they do to any given word, but then once you know them it’s much easier to read that word.

Everything that Dolnick explains is equally vivid. The Napoleonic Wars are fascinating under his pen, with Napoleon sneaking out of Egypt, the soldiers he left in the dust struggling to rebuild and maintain old forts, one of the workers finding a cool engraved stone in one of those forts, the general in charge falling in love with that engraved stone and sleeping with it under his bed, and that same general pitching an absolute fit at having to give it up to the British after their defeat because he considered it his own personal engraved stone, not France’s.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by History Memes (@fuckchurchill)

The time of Ptolemy is equally fascinating. The rulers were Greek because of Alexander the Great--did y’all know that?!? I did not know that. The good part is that pharaohs stopped marrying their sisters for a while (but not forever!), but the bad part is that none of them even knew the Egyptian language, just Greek, which is why they eventually had to send out an engraved stone to tell the populace that they were nevertheless doing the proper Egyptian stuff even though they weren’t properly Egyptian… and they had to put the message in Greek, too, so they could read it.

What I really need to do next is find a good, accessible, super interesting overall history of Ancient Egypt, because the parts of the book that were a deep dive into the history of Ancient Egypt would have made a lot more sense if I’d gone into it understanding how far, for instance, Cleopatra actually was from proper Ancient Egypt: about 3000 years! That’s longer than Cleopatra to US!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dr Marina Escolano-Poveda 𓋇 (@hypatiaheuresis)

Also? Champollion wins.

P.S. View all my reviews

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!