Something that I find amazing is the great age of the Romans' top god Jupiter. We all know he is the same bloke as the Greeks' Zeus, but we can trace him way back much further than when he arrived in Europe. (1/5) Zeus appears in Linear B tablets from the Mycenaean age, together with many of the other familiar gods, taking us back to c. 1500BC (2/5)

As a contribution to the current, #humanities debate, here's what Juan-Luis Vives, the Spanish humanist, thought of STEM-types 500 hundred years ago. (1/7) STEM is not suitable for "those who are suspicious, or who twist everything into the worst shape... Nor should those who are weak in religious convictions be introduced to this subject." (2/7)

Shopping for the booze for our daughter's 18th birthday reminded me of the convoluted story of how we got the word 'alcohol'. Everyone thinks it is Arabic but that isn't exactly true. (1/7) Going back thousands of years, we find the Akkadian word 'gulhu'. It's not clear what it meant, but it seems to have been some sort of fine black powder. (2/7)

I'm obsessed with the question of how much ancient literature has survived to the present day. The answer isn't always what you'd expect: a case in point is Akkadian. (1/8) Akkadian is found in cuneiform tablets that began to be uncovered in large numbers in the early-nineteenth century. They were deciphered with help from multi-lingual inscriptions, most famously at Mt Behistun in Iran. (2/8)

It isn't often that an artwork takes my breathe away, but #Donatello's Penitent Magdalene certainly did. (1/5) She's a life-sized wooden sculpture once in the Florentine Baptistry, now in the Duomo Museum. As she's not on a pedestal or anything, you can get right up close (Michaelangelo's Pieta in the background below). (2/5)

People often talk about how little literature survives from the ancient world, and if they are talking about Latin, they are right. (1/6) The late professor John Vincent thought 10 million words of ancient Latin survive, but two million are legal texts and only a million are pre-Christian. A million words is roughly twice the size of The Lord of the Rings. (2/6)

My inspiration for phrase 'subjunctive science' came from the book Franciscans and the Elixir of Life by Zachary Matus. #Alchemy

https://twitter.com/DrJamesHannam/status/1629047828365422592

Matus is trying to understand how the Franciscans understood that alchemy 'worked' when the promised effects were conspicuous in their absence. He suggests they privileged the subjunctive over the 'real'.