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LiorLefineder

@lefineder

Dec 28, 2024 • 23 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X

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Just finished reading "Letters from Mesopotamia", here are some thousands of years old letters preserved in cuneiform.
1. "Mom buy me this" - Iddin-Sin to his mother

2. "Dad buy me this" - Adad-abum to his father.

3. "take my wife"
If you didn't pay your debts your family members can be confiscated.

4." to encourage the others" - letter from a military commander to the king of Mari.

5. Logistic letter requesting 10 boats of 300 kor to send 3000 kor to the kingdom of Mari.
Since a kor equals 300 liters, the capacity of each of these middle bronze age ships is 100 tons.

https://x.com/lefineder/status/1834401287942603043

Relatedly

https://x.com/lefineder/status/1834401287942603043

6. Letter reporting cart problems

7. Report of an investigation of a brutal murder in the kingdom of Mari.

8. Letter about a really fun military campaign, everybody was having a blast.

9. So we caught a lion

10. Letter from the king of Babylon to the king of Egypt in which the Babylonian king discovers Egypt is far away.

11. Several letters from the king of Cyprus (Alashiya) to the king of Egypt about the ongoing plague in Cyprus.
"even in my family, there was a child of my wife's who died"

12. Letter from a governor in the Levant sucking up to the king of Egypt.
"I was extremely glad when the fragrance of the king wafted towards me and there was a festival every day because I was so glad"

13. Letter to the Neo-Assyrian king, the people you appointed are drunkards.

14. Letter from the daughter of the king of Assyria to the daughter-in-law of the king, reassuring her that she is of lower status.

15. Letter describing a religious ritual between the gods in the city of Calah.

16. Neo-Assyrian letter describing an Arab raid on the desert Caravans, one of the earliest attestations of the Arabs.

17. Backroom politics between the neo-Assyrian king and his governor.
You sent troops to confiscate lapis lazuli from the people and I will pretend to be angry about it.

18. Bayblonain letter from a sister to her brother.

19. Bayblonain letter from a brother to his sister.

20. letter from the Hittite king about how murder cases are handled.

21. Letter between Anatolian merchants, admonishing not to send merchandise to those who are permanently unavailable.

Letter collection can be found here:
isac.uchicago.edu/research/publi…

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LiorLefineder

@lefineder

Feb 9

Under the Qing dynasty, China experienced a massive expansion in population, growing from 50-150 million persons in the Ming Era to around 400 million by the mid 19th century.

The main reasons for this extraordinary expansion🧵

Was first its military expansion, by 1760, the Qing, under the "Ten Great Campaigns of conquest," had incorporated a massive amount of new land.

In the following decades, a mass movement of Han people into this new farmland significantly expanded agricultural production.

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LiorLefineder

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Jan 13

Between the late medieval era and 1800, literacy rates in Britain increased from 5% to over 60%.

This happened despite virtually no state investment in Education in a bottom-up process motivated by individual interest in acquiring literacy and Protestant religious zeal in spreading it.

Before the mass establishment of a public education system, the average male during the early industrial revolution had, on average, 1 year of schooling.

As far as higher learning, there were more men with a university degree in late medieval England than in early industrial-era England.

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LiorLefineder

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Jan 9

Balkan Mining activity in the Bronze and Iron.

Mining first started in the 4th millennium BC and suffered major disruptions toward the end of Old Europe around 3000 BC and in the late Bronze Age with the collapse of Mycenaean civilization.

The Copper Age civilizations of Old Europe.

tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

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LiorLefineder

@lefineder

Dec 30, 2025

Unable to defend itself from Umayyad incursions, the independent Duchy of Aquitaine surrendered to Charles Martel, who turned back the Umayyad at the Battle of Tours.

Aquitaine was worth to the Franks much more than the sum of its people; it contained valuable silver mines, in particular the Melle mines, which became the most productive source of silver in the Carolingian empire.

Isotope analysis of Carolingian coins shows that before the 750s, most of the silver in coinage came from recycled Byzantine silver, while afterwards most came from Frankish mines, with Melle supplying the largest share.

The mining work has created a network of over twenty kilometers of tunnels.

Melle silver is characterized by low gold content, while the opposite is true for Byzantine silver. Isotope analysis of north-west European coinage shows a decline of gold content in silver coinage, indicating a transition from Byzantine to Melle silver.

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LiorLefineder

@lefineder

Dec 15, 2025

"A single mass killing of more than 140 children and over 200 camelids directed by the Chimú state, c. AD 1450."

Cuts transecting the child's sternum and displaced ribs suggests that "the chest had been cut open, perhaps to extract the heart." For most skeletons "No other evidence of perimortem trauma was observed" indicating the extraction of the heart was done on live victims.

As Spanish chronicler Cristóbal de Molina described "children had their live hearts taken out, and so the priests offered the beating hearts to the huacas to which the sacrifice was made."

Children were brought from across the region to be sacrificed next to the Chimú capital.
"Variability in forms of cranial modification and stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen suggest that the children were a heterogeneous sample drawn from multiple regions and ethnic groups throughout the Chimú state."

The sacrifice coincided with a major weather event, heavy rains and flooding carried a layer of mud on top of the burials in their aftermate, "it is tempting to hypothesize that the two wventa are associated"

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LiorLefineder

@lefineder

Dec 14, 2025

There is a notion that largely peaceful hunter-gatherers are pressed into violent conflict due to population pressure and resource scarcity, but if you check with HGs, 'why are they fighting?' They would often respond It's about Women and Vengeance.

In a sample of 111 conflicts between Australian aborigines whose proximate reason can be discerned, 58% were about Women, 28% were about revenge, and a minority were about territory or material plunder; "Territorial conflicts, if not totally absent, remain negligible: this motivation appears only in three occasions...The two main causes of conflicts are retaliation and, above all, rights over women."

When Napoleon Chagnon told the Yanomamo, a relatively war-like Amazon tribe, that American academics think that they fight over "game animals and meat," they laughed and responded: "We do like meat, we like women a whole lot more!"

"It is often believed that because they lacked wealth, economically egalitarian societies possessed none of the motivations which, for millennia, prompt human beings to kill each other, and therefore lethal collective confrontations were unknown in these societies."

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