Cover reveal for 'Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic', coming April 2022 (it's a generic cover for the Foundations series, but I like it anyway) 🇱🇹🇱🇻🇪🇪 🐍🔥🌳 Arc Humanities Press

In my humble opinion, we do not value the Shahnameh enough. This book is literally an epic mythical (and not that mythical) history of our ancestors. A compilation of Bactrian, Khwarezmian, Parthian, Persian, Saka/Scythian and Sogdian cultural traditions.

And here it is! The final map with all counties as people, animals and mythological creatures. You can buy a print of it and the individual counties here paulbroughall.gallery/shop/p/ppl8fc3…

GALLERY: Doonbeg residents commemorate air tragedy. Words: Dan Danaher News Photographs: John Kelly clarechampion.ie/gallery-doonbe…

Word of the day is 'roundaboutation' (19th century): bloviating or evasive talk that focuses on everything but the subject in hand.

"Neil Wilkin, curator of the British Museum’s exhibition, said very few discoveries turned up "that change what we think about the period and also about our [museum] collections. We have been waiting 150 years for a new object like this to come up"." thetimes.co.uk/article/decora…

Exciting new study promises to add Sound to our appreciation of Byzantium. Thanks to the authors and GABAM for such a beautiful book

Elephant, detail of the 6th century mosaic floor from the Palatium Magnum (Constantinople’s Great Palace), Istanbul.

Finally (FINALLY) drove the half an hour out to Llancarfan in the Vale of Glamorgan to see the extraordinary 15thC wall paintings unveiled recently after centuries of being hidden under whitewash...

Our edited volume, The Routledge Handbook on Identity in Byzantium, is now out and available for purchase! There are 23 excellent chapters on various aspects of identity in the Byzantine Empire. routledge.com/The-Routledge-…

monk and his cat reading together, france, 13th century

We are heartbroken at the death of our beloved author, Dame Hilary Mantel, and our thoughts are with her friends and family, especially her husband, Gerald. This is a devastating loss and we can only be grateful she left us with such a magnificent body of work.

Conservation problems in Israel: collapse of an arch of Caesarea's aqueduct collapses, and warnings that Acre's aqueduct is in poor condition. timesofisrael.com/arch-of-famous…

اول مصافحة مسجلة في التاريخ كانت بين ملك اشور شلمنصر الثالث و ملك بابل مردوخ زاكيري القرن التاسع ق.م The first handshake recorded in history It was between the king of Assyria Shalmanzer III and the king of Babylon Mardukh Zaciri Ninth century BC

In Anglo-Saxon England, September was known as Hærfestmonað, 'harvest month', or Haligmonað, 'holy month', perhaps because of rituals celebrating the end of harvest. Here's an extract from 'Winters in the World' on the month when summer gives way to the dark half of the year.

A Hellenistic/#Roman-period glass bowl, with yellow spirals, & chunks of purple, green, blue, & white glass all joined by clear glass, with a blue & white striped rim. It looks amazing - hard to believe it was made 2000-2100 years ago! (📷 Yale Uni Art Gallery) #Archaeology

On 2 September 1973 J.R.R. #Tolkien died aged 81. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is the best-selling book of the 20th Century, and is joined by seminal works The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. He may have died 50 years ago but his influence and legacy lives on in us all. Namárië.

So sad to report the death of Elizabeth Jeffreys, Bywater & Sotheby Professor of Byzantine & Modern Greek Language and Literature University of Oxford. She was an outstanding scholar & a generous mentor to so many of us Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. She'll be greatly missed. byzantium.ac.uk/elizabeth-jeff…

Hello everyone, @gwenofmonmouth and I are super excited to present to you the FINAL of the Medieval Writers World Cup🥳 Thanks to all those who participated! We've had a great time. But before we go, we must of course crown our winner. Let's vote! #MWWC