Bunny's Burrow: Hopping into Life

  The Book of the Dead of Djedhor A Ptolemaic Window into Theban Afterlife Practices RMO AMS 47a vel 9 / Sheet 9 There is something wonderfully misleading about the title Book of the Dead. It sounds final. Closed. A book placed beside a body because the story has ended. The ancient Egyptian title points in precisely the opposite direction: Spells for Going Forth by Day. Not a manual for remaining dead, but a manual for movement—for opening doors, for remembering names, and for keeping the soul intact when the world has changed shape around you. On one fragile sheet of papyrus in Leiden, a Theban priest named Djedhor is still doing exactly that. Sheet 9 of his funerary papyrus, now preserved in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden under inventory number AMS 47a vel 9, belongs to the Ptolemaic Period, between 305 and 30 BC. It is not visually enormous... roughly 38 by 41 centimetres... but size is a poor measure of ambition. This little sheet was built for eternity. It once formed part of a ...

  Привет, dear readers. I am Bunny (Not the name my parents gave me), a wandering soul from the frozen beauty of the Yakutia area in Sakha Republic but now USA. In Yakutia, the brief, magical summers teach you to hold warmth exceptionally close. I still remember a soft summer evening years ago. The air carried the scent of pine and wildflowers, and there she was.. the beautiful and older Anya. A pretty Russian girl with laughing eyes and hair that caught the golden light like threads of silk. We’d been talking for hours at her place. She was older, but we bonded over maths. We laughed, joked, and found a happy place lost in deep conversation, our hearts racing with unspoken questions. Then, in a quiet moment, our lips met. Gentle, tentative, electric. My first kiss with a girl. Time slowed, the world narrowed to the warmth of her touch and the flutter in my chest. It was sweet, surprising, and perfectly imperfect. John Michael Montgomery sings about this exact sort of momentum in ...

Project Origins: Case File 001 The Flood Tradition Part I  The Oldest Flood Story We Can Actually Read Notebook opened.   Question for today: what is the oldest flood story we can actually read? If you are joining this investigation from the middle of the river, the first notebook page is here: Project Origins: Case File 001 — The Flood Tradition . That introduction explains the method we will use throughout this case file: separating observation from inference, keeping speculation politely labelled, and letting the evidence remain complicated when it needs to be complicated. Today we open the first evidence box. Not the most famous one, and not the one most of us met first as children, but the older and more awkward question waiting underneath it: when people talk about “the oldest flood story,” what do they actually mean? I thought that question would be simple. It was not. The moment I started following the tablets, the word oldest became slippery ...

Case File 001  The Flood Tradition Project Origins : following one of humanity’s oldest stories through tablets, rivers, ruins, and memory. Some stories are so old that they feel less like inventions and more like fossils. The Flood is one of them. It appears in Mesopotamian tablets, biblical literature , later Jewish and Christian traditions, Islamic memory , Greek sources, and flood stories from cultures scattered across the world. That does not mean they all describe the same event. It also does not mean they are completely unrelated. Both answers are too easy, and history usually becomes most interesting just after the easy answers stop working. So this investigation begins carefully. Not with a conclusion, and not with a sermon. With a question: how did the Flood tradition develop? What This Investigation Is Project Origins is a long-form historical investigation into the development of humanity’s oldest stories. The first case file follows the F...

Project Origins Following humanity's oldest stories back to where the evidence leads because EVERY civilization inherits stories. Some explain where we came from and others explain why the world is the way it is. A remarkable number remember a great flood. That doesn't automatically mean they all describe the same event. It also doesn't mean they're completely unrelated. Those are conclusions. I'm interested in something that comes first. How did these stories come to be? That's what Project Origins exists to investigate. What This Project Is This is a long-term historical investigation into humanity's oldest traditions. We'll follow manuscripts, inscriptions, archaeological discoveries, languages, geology, and the work of historians to reconstruct how these stories developed over time. Sometimes the evidence will point in a clear direction. Sometimes it won't. Both outcomes are worth understanding. What This Pro...

Part III  The Man Who Drew the Map Antonio da Montolmo and When Learned Magic Found a System  Most ideas don't arrive with a trumpet blast. They arrive quietly. A careful observation in the margin of a manuscript. A lecture that asks one question too many. A scholar who notices two ideas that everyone else has kept safely apart and wonders what would happen if they belonged together. By the time anyone realizes something has changed, the change has already happened.  Last time we met Cecco d'Ascoli , the physician, poet, and professor whose curiosity carried him into increasingly dangerous territory. His execution in Florence wasn't the end of our story. If anything, it marked the beginning of another. Because ideas are remarkably difficult to execute. They have an annoying habit of surviving the people who first ask them.   As I started following the trail beyond Cecco, I expected to find a sharp break. A warning that frightened scholars back into safer ...