It took 90 years to complete. But, in 2011, scholars at the University of Chicago finally published a 21-volume dictionary of Akkadian, the language used in ancient Mesopotamia. Unspoken for 2,000 years, Akkadian was preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions until scholars deciphered it during the last two centuries.
It was long ago that polytheism, as the story comes down to us, gave way to monotheism. Humanity used to have many gods, and now almost every religious believer acknowledges just one — though which god, exactly, does vary. Some popular theories of “big history” hold that, as the scale of a society grows larger, the number of deities proposed by its faiths gets smaller. In that scheme, it makes sense that the growing Roman Empire would eventually adopt Christianity, and also that the gods it first inherited from the city-states of ancient Greece would be so numerous. Through our modern eyes, the various immortals invoked so readily by the Greeks look less like holy figures than a cast of characters in a long-running television drama.
Or maybe it would have to be a soap opera, given that most of them belong to one big, often troubled clan. Hence the structure of UsefulCharts’ Greek Mythology Family Tree, explained in the video above. Also available for purchase in poster form, it clearly diagrams the relationships between everyone in the Greek pantheon, from the highest “primordial gods” like Eros Elder and Gaia down to the children of Zeus and Poseidon.
However powerful they could be — and some were powerful indeed — none of these gods acted like the infallible, omniscient entities of the major religions we know today. They could act capriciously, vengefully and even nonsensically, a reflection of the often capricious‑, vengeful‑, and nonsensical-seeming nature of life in the ancient world.
For the Greeks themselves, these mythical gods and monsters offered not just an explanatory mechanism, but also a form of entertainment, given that nothing could go on in their elevated world without high drama. For us, they remain present in legends from which we still draw inspiration for our own larger-than-life stories of heroism and villainy, but also in our very language. Consider the ways in which we continue to evoke the likes of the time-ruling Chronos, the love-bringing Cupid, the androgynous Hermaphroditus, or the multi-headed Hydra in everyday speech. Though we may no longer need them to organize our societies, some of them have kept playing roles in the age of monotheism — which, whatever its other advantages, doesn’t require us to consult diagrams to know who’s who.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It is a method of pressurized coffee brewing that ensures speedy delivery, and it has birthed a whole culture.
Americans may be accustomed to camping out in cafes with their laptops for hours, but Italian coffee bars are fast-paced environments where customers buzz in for a quick pick-me-up, then head right back out, no seat required.
It’s the sort of efficiency the Father of the Modern Advertising Poster, Leonetto Cappiello, alluded to in his famous 1922 image for the Victoria Arduino machine (below).
Let 21st-century coffee aficionados cultivate their Zen-like patience with slow pourovers. A hundred years ago, the goal was a quality product that the successful businessperson could enjoy without breaking stride.
As coffee expert James Hoffmann, author of The World Atlas of Coffee points out in the above video, the Steam Age was on the way out, but Cappiello’s image is “absolutely leveraging the idea that steam equals speed.”
That had been the goal since 1884, when inventor Angelo Moriondo patented the first espresso machine (see below).
The bulk brewer caused a stir at the Turin General Exposition. Speed wise, it was a great improvement over the old method, in which individual cups were brewed in the Turkish style, requiring five minutes per order.
This “new steam machinery for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverage” featured a gas or wood burner at the bottom of an upright boiler, and two sight glasses that the operator could monitor to get a feel for when to open the various taps, to yield a large quantity of filtered coffee. It was fast, but demanded some skill on the part of its human operator.
As Jimmy Stamp explains in a Smithsonian article on the history of the espresso machine, there were also a few bugs to work out.
Early machines’ hand-operated pressure valves posed a risk to workers, and the coffee itself had a burnt taste.
Milanese café owner Achille Gaggia cracked the code after WWII, with a small, steamless lever-driven machine that upped the pressure to produce the concentrated brew that iswhat we now think of as espresso.
Stamp describes how Gaggia’s machine also standardized the size of the espresso, giving rise to some now-familiar coffeehouse vocabulary:
The cylinder on lever groups could only hold an ounce of water, limiting the volume that could be used to prepare an espresso. With the lever machines also came some new jargon: baristas operating Gaggia’s spring-loaded levers coined the term “pulling a shot” of espresso. But perhaps most importantly, with the invention of the high-pressure lever machine came the discovery of crema – the foam floating over the coffee liquid that is the defining characteristic of a quality espresso. A historical anecdote claims that early consumers were dubious of this “scum” floating over their coffee until Gaggia began referring to it as “caffe creme,“ suggesting that the coffee was of such quality that it produced its own creme.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.
It wouldn’t surprise us to come across a Japanese person in Venice. Indeed, given the global touristic appeal of the place, we could hardly imagine a day there without a visitor from the Land of the Rising Sun. But things were different in 1873, just five years after the end of the sakoku policy that all but closed Japan to the world for two and a half centuries. On a mission to research the modern ways of the newly accessible outside world, a Japanese delegation arrived in Venice and found in the state archives two letters written in Latin by one of their countrymen, dated 1615 and 1616. Its author seemed to have been an emissary of Ōtomo Sōrin, a feudal lord who converted to Christianity and once sent a mission of four teenagers to meet the Pope in Rome — a mission that took place earlier, in 1586.
So who could this undocumented Japanese traveler in the fifteen-tens have been? That question lies at the heart of the story told by Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak in his new video above. The letter’s signature of Hasekura Rokemon would’ve constituted a major clue, but the name seems not to have rung a bell with anyone at the time.
“In 1873, there was likely no one on planet Earth who knew why Hasekura Rokemon was in Venice in 1615,” says Puschak. The reasons have to do with the arrival of Christianity in Japan — or at least the arrival of the first major Jesuit missionary — in 1549. Not every ruler looked kindly on their work, and especially not Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who ordered them removed from the country in 1587 and later had 26 Catholics crucified in Nagasaki.
Hideyoshi was succeeded by the more tolerant Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), during whose rule the Japanese-speaking Franciscan friar Luis Sotelo arrived in Japan. Over the ensuing decade, he worked not just to spread his faith but also to build hospitals, one of which successfully treated a European concubine of the feudal lord Date Masamune. The two men got on, realizing the mutual benefit their relationship could bring: perhaps Sotelo could found a new diocese in Date’s northern territory, and perhaps Date could establish links with the Spanish empire. In order to accomplish the latter, he had a ship built and a team assembled for a mission to Europe, including Sotelo himself. He sent with them a loyal retainer, a samurai by the name of Hasekura Rokemon — or to use his full name, Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga, previously featured here on Open Culture for his meeting with the pope and adoption of Roman citizenship. He may have been Japanese, but a mere tourist he certainly wasn’t.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It’s easy to imagine the myriad difficulties with which you’d be faced if you were suddenly transported a millennium back in time. But if you’re a native (or even proficient) English speaker in an English-speaking part of the world, the language, at least, surely wouldn’t be a problem. Or so you’d think, until your first encounter with utterances like “þat troe is daed on gaerde” or “þa rokes forleten urne tun.” Both of those sentences appear in the new video above from Simon Roper, in which he delivers a monologue beginning in the English of the fifth century and ending in the English of the end of the last millennium.
But writing and delivering a monologue that works its way through a millennium and a half of change in the English language is obviously a thornier endeavor, not least because it involves literal thorns — the þ characters, that is, used in the Old English Latin alphabet. They’re pronounced like th, which you can hear when Roper speaks the sentences quoted earlier, which translate to “The tree is dead in the yard” and “The rooks abandoned our town.”
The word translate should give us pause, since we’re only talking about English. But then, English has undergone such a dramatic evolution that, at far enough of a remove, we might as well be talking about different languages. What Roper emphasizes is that the changes didn’t happen suddenly. Non-Scandinavian listeners may lack even an inkling that his farmer of the year 450 is talking about sheep and pigs with the words skēpu and swīnu, but his final lines, in which he speaks of possessing “all the hot coffee I need” and “friends I didn’t have in New York” in the year 2000, will pose no difficulty to Anglophones anywhere in the world. Even his list of agricultural wealth around the early thirteenth century — “We habben an god hus, we habben mani felds” — could make you believe that a trip 600 years in the past would be, as they said in Middle English, no trouble.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It will no doubt come as a relief to many readers that Santa Claus appears to have been a Union supporter. We know this because he appears distributing gifts to soldiers from that side of the Mason-Dixon in one of his earliest depictions. That illustration, “Santa Claus in Camp” (above), first appeared in the Harper’s Weekly Christmas issue of 1862, when the American Civil War was still tearing its way through the country. Its artist, a Bavarian immigrant named Thomas Nast, is now remembered for having first drawn the Democratic Party as a donkey and the Republican Party as an elephant, but he also did more than anyone else to create the image of Santa Claus recognized around the world today: more than Norman Rockwell, and more, even, than the Coca-Cola Company.
Santa Claus is an Anglicization of Sinterklaas, a Dutch name for Saint Nicholas, who lived and died in what’s now Turkey in the third and fourth centuries, and who’s been remembered since for his kindness to children. Few of us would recognize him in his portrait from 1294 that is included in the Public Domain Review’s pictorial history of Santa Claus, but with the passing of the centuries, his images became mixed with those of other flying, winter-associated characters from Germanic and Norse myth. In 1822, Clement Moore performed a defining act of rhyming synthesis with his poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (often called “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”): in its verses we find the bundle of toys, the rosy cheeks, the white beard, the belly shaking like a bowl full of jelly.
Nast clearly understood not just the appeal of Moore’s description, but also the character’s propaganda value. His very first renditions of Santa Claus appear in the upper corners of an 1862 Harper’s Weekly illustration of a praying wife and her Yankee soldier husband. Nearly two decades later, Nast drew the cartoon “Merry Old Santa Claus” (immediately above), whose central figure remains immediately recognizable to us today, even as its motivating political cause of higher wages for the military has become obscure. In the twentieth century, the iconic Father Christmas would be enlisted again to lend public support to U.S. efforts in World War I and II, in the very decades when Rockwell was further refining and cementing his image in popular culture. The once-unlikely result was an American Santa Claus: “the symbol of our empire,” in the words of TheNew Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, “as much as Apollo was of the Hellenic one.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
One can hardly consider the Christmas season for long, at least in the English-speaking world, without the work of Charles Dickens coming to mind. That owes for the most part, of course, to A Christmas Carol, the novella that revived the public culture of a holiday that had been falling into desuetude by the mid-nineteenth century. Whatever its literary shortcomings, the book offers a host of memorable images, not least culinary ones: Mrs. Cratchit’s pudding, for instance, which Dickens likens to “a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half or half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.”
In the Tasting History video at the top of the post, host Max Miller teaches you how to make just such a holiday pudding — and indeed a figgy one, a confection whose name we all recognize from no less a standard carol than “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” even if we don’t know that pudding, in the Victorian sense, refers to a kind of cake.
The figgy pudding Miller makes from an original 1845 recipe looks, and seems to taste, more like an alcohol-soaked version of the fruitcakes many of us still receive come Christmastime. Despite its reputation for leaden undesirability, reinforced by decade after decade of Johnny Carson gags, the fruitcake has a rich history, which Miller reveals in the video just above, and culinary strengths beyond its extreme shelf life.
This playlist of 20 Christmas-themed videos offers many more such delights: Turkish delight, for instance, as well as Victorian sugar plums, medieval gingerbread, and historical versions of such still-common comforts and joys as eggnog and pumpkin pie. And if you’ve ever wondered to what wassail — as a noun or a verb — actually refers, have a look at the video above, in which Miller explains it all while making a pot of the stuff, which turns out to be a kind of applesauce-enriched ale. Wassail, too, is a favorite Dickens reference, and not just in A Christmas Carol. His first novel The Pickwick Papers includes a Christmas feast with “a mighty bowl of wassail, something smaller than an ordinary wash-house copper, in which the hot apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look, and a jolly sound, that were perfectly irresistible”: the kind of image that, nearly two centuries later, still makes readers want to go a‑wassailing.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
When discussing a musician like Fela Kuti, many of our usual terms fail us. They fail us, that is, if we came of age in a musical culture in which artists and bands put out an album of ten or so lyrics-forward songs every two or three years, promoting it on tour while also playing their biggest hits. Fela — as all his fans refer to him — could put out six or seven albums in a single year, and refused to play live any material he’d already recorded. Even the word song, as we know it, doesn’t quite reflect the nature of his compositions, which got expansive enough that two or three of them (or just one, half of it on each side) could fill a long-playing record.
Walter Benjamin said of great literary works that they either dissolve a genre or invent one, and Fela’s musical works invented the genre of Afrobeat. The sound of that genre, as explained by Noah Lefevre in the Polyphonic video above, reflects the distinctive formation of Fela himself, who was born and raised in Nigeria, studied at the Trinity College of Music in London, and came of age during the end of Africa’s era of decolonization. To a listener reared on Anglo-American popular music, his signature mixture of West African rhythms with jazz and funk textures sounds familiar enough — at least for the first ten or fifteen minutes, after which time the listening experience ascends to a different state entirely.
Sometimes it takes Fela just about that long to start singing, and when he does, he’s given to proclamations, chants, calls-and-responses, and political exhortations delivered in the kind of English that sounds highly unfamiliar to non-African listeners. Not that it’s always alienating: indeed, this particular combination of words and music has captivated generations of listeners from far outside its place of origin. One of them is David Byrne, who used Talking Heads’ Remain in Light as more or less a medium for channeling the musical spirit of Fela. Not that he himself was gone yet: indeed, he had almost two decades of his eventful life to go, one you can learn much more about from Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, a twelve-part biographical podcast by Jad Abumrad.
Brought into Fela’s world by a family connection, that former Radiolab host conducted dozens and dozens of interviews on the relationship between the man, his music, and the political context in which he found himself. The facts, as any Fela fan knows, don’t always align comfortably with mainstream sensibilities of the twenty-twenties — the charges range from essentialism to polygamy — but as Lefevre reminds us, an artist should be interpreted through the lens of his own culture and history. However many of us consider him a “problematic fave” today, Fela Kuti will always be the man who invented Afrobeat — and since nobody else has quite managed to replicate his grooves in their simultaneous tightness and looseness, bluntness and subtlety, perhaps also the man who dissolved it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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