The Genius Engineering of Roman Aqueducts

in Architecture, History, Technology | October 16th, 2025

We tend to think of the Roman Empire as having fallen around 476 AD, but had things gone a little differently, it could have come to its end much earlier — before it technically began, in fact. In the year 44 BC, for instance, the assassination of Julius Caesar and the civil wars raging across its territories made it seem as if the foundering Roman Republic was about to go down and take Roman civilization with it. It fell to one man to ensure that civilization’s continuity: “His name was Octavian, and he was Caesar’s adopted son,” says science reporter Carolyn Beans in the new Coded Chambers video above. “At first, no one expected much from him,” but when he took control, he set about rebuilding the empire “city by city” before it had officially been declared one.

This ambitious project of restoration necessitated an equally ambitious shoring up of infrastructure, no single example of which more clearly represents Roman engineering prowess than the empire’s aqueducts.

Using as an example the system that fed the city of Nemausus, or modern-day Nîmes, Beans explains all that went into their construction over great lengths of challenging terrain — no stage of which, of course, benefited from modern construction techniques — with the help of University of Texas at Austin classical archaeology professor Rabun Taylor. The most basic task for Rome’s engineers was to determine the proper slope of the aqueduct’s channels: too steep, and the flowing water could cause damage; too flat, and it could stop before reaching its destination.

Surveying the prospective aqueduct’s route involved such ancient tools as the dioptra (used to establish direction and distance over long stretches of land), the groma (for straight lines and right angles between checkpoints), and the chorobates (to check if a surface was level). Then construction could begin on a network of underground tunnels called cuniculi. Where digging them proved unfeasible, up went arcades, some of which — like the Pont du Gard in southern France, seen in the video — still stand today. They do so thanks in large part to their limestone bricks having been arranged into arches, whose geometry directs tension in a way that allows the stone to support itself, with no masonry required. When water began running through an aqueduct and into the city, it would then be distributed to the gardens, fountains, thermae, and elsewhere — through conduit pipes that happened to be made of lead, but then, even the most brilliant Roman engineers couldn’t foresee every problem.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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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The Night When Bob Dylan Went Electric: Watch Him Play “Maggie’s Farm” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965

in History, Music | October 16th, 2025

The phrase “when Dylan went electric” once carried as much weight in pop culture history as “the fall of the Berlin Wall” carries in, well, history. Both events have receded into what feels like the distant past, but in the early 1960s, they likely seemed equally unlikely to many a serious Bob Dylan fan in the folk scene. They also seemed equally consequential. To understand the culture of the decade, we must understand the import of Dylan’s appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, backed by Mike Bloomfield and other members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

The death of rock and roll in the 50s is often told through the lens of tragedy, but there was also anger, disgust, and mass disaffection. The Payola scandal had an impact, as did Elvis joining the army and Little Richard’s return to religion. Rock and roll was broken, tamed, and turned into commercial fodder. Simply put, it wasn’t cool at all, man, and even the Beatles couldn’t save it singlehandedly. Their arrival on U.S. shores is mythologized as music history Normandy—and has been credited with inspiring countless numbers of musicians—but without Dylan and the blues artists he imitated, things would very much have gone otherwise.

In the early 60s, Dylan and the Beatles’ “respective musical constituencies were indeed perceived as inhabiting two separate subcultural worlds,” writes Jonathan Gould in Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America. “Dylan’s core audience was comprised of young people emerging from adolescence—college kids with artistic or intellectual leanings, a dawning political and social idealism, and a mildly bohemian style…. The Beatles’ core audience, by contrast, was comprised of veritable ‘teenyboppers’—kids in high school or grade school whose lives were totally wrapped up in the commercialized popular culture of television, radio, pop records, fan magazines, and teen fashion. They were seen as idolaters, not idealists.”

To evoke anything resembling the commercial pablum of Beatlemania, and at Newport, no less, spoke of treason to folk authenticity. Some called out “Where’s Ringo?” Others called him “Judas.” Dylan’s set “would go down as one of the most divisive concerts ever”—(and that’s saying a lot)—“putting the worlds of both folk and rock in temporary identity crisis,” Michael Madden writes at Consequence of Sound. The former folk hero accomplished this in all of three songs, “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Phantom Engineer,” an early take on “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” Pete Seeger famously “threw a furious tantrum” upon hearing the first few bars of “Maggie’s Farm,” above, though he’s since said he was upset at the sound quality.

The moment was defining—and Dylan apparently decided to do it on a whim after hearing Alan Lomax insult the Paul Butterfield Band, who were giving a workshop at the festival. He came back onstage afterward to play two acoustic songs for the appreciative audience who remained, unfazed by the vehemence of half the crowd’s reaction to his earlier set. Yet the revolution to return rock to its folk and blues roots was already underway. Within six months of meeting Dylan in 1964, Gould writes, “John Lennon would be making records on which he openly imitated Dylan’s nasal drone, brittle strum, and introspective vocal persona.” (Dylan also introduced him to cannabis.)

In 1965, “the distinctions between the folk and rock audiences would have nearly evaporated.” The two met in the middle. “The Beatles’ audience, in keeping with the way of the world, would be showing signs of growing up,” while Dylan’s fans showed signs of “growing down, as hundreds of thousands of folkies in their late teens and early twenties” rediscovered “the ethos of their adolescent years.” They also discovered electric blues. Newport shows Dylan accelerating the transition, and also signified the arrival of the great electric blues-rock guitarists, in the form of the inimitable Mike Bloomfield, an invading force all his own, who inspired a generation with his licks on “Like a Rolling Stone” and on the absolute classic Paul Butterfield Blues Band debut album, released in The Year Dylan Went Electric.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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Why Real Biblical Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and Hardly Angelic

in History, Religion | October 15th, 2025

Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe in angels, at least according to a statistic often cited in recent years. But what, exactly, comes to their minds — or those of any other believers around the world — when they imagine one? Personal conceptions may vary, of course, but we can be fairly certain of one thing: most of them will bear no resemblance to the angels actually described in the Bible. Here to give us a sense of their appearance is Tommie Trelawny, creator of the YouTube channel Hochelaga, whose video above explains “Why Bible Accurate Angels Are So Creepy.”

Far from the winged, white-robed embodiments of gentleness we might know from greeting cards, says Trelawny, the angels of the Bible, and specifically the Old Testament, are “horrifying abominations” who would be more at home in an H. P. Lovecraft novel. Angel, from the Greek angelos, which itself comes from the Hebrew mal’akh, means “messenger.” That implies an innocuous-enough set of duties, but then, you may recall the story of Passover, with its angel who slaughtered the Egyptians’ first-born sons; or the angel who “struck 70,000 Israelites to death”; or the angel who “singlehandedly killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in one night.”

The Bible doesn’t say anything about those angels having wings. “In fact, they look like any ordinary person,” as do even the most famous examples like Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. In the grand heavenly scheme of things, such humanoid angels, or Malakh, don’t rank particularly high. Still, they’re one rung above the Cherubim, who turn out to be less like Cupid and more like “the mythical beasts of ancient Mesopotamia, especially the Babylonian Lamassu, which has the wings of an eagle, the body of a lion, and the head of a king” — with a more-than-passing resemblance to the Egyptian sphinx or the Hittite griffin. Even the popular image of the pudgy, flying cherub, which emerged much later, seems to have been imported from Greek and Roman myths.

Ranked above the Malakh are the six-winged Seraphim, or “burning ones.” The origins of these “caretakers of God’s throne” are suggested by the Hebrew word Saraph, meaning “a venomous serpent in the desert,” much like the cobra whose image adorned the head of the Egyptian pharaoh. As for the Ophanim, it’s anyone’s guess where they come from. Taking the form of a wheel within a wheel floating in the sky, its rims lined with eyes, an Ophan would make for an intimidating sight indeed: perhaps a representation of the wheels of God’s chariot, perhaps the result of “the prophet ingesting a psychedelic plant,” and perhaps — according to a fringe theory — visitation by a spacecraft. Whatever the evidence for those explanations, it’s safe to say they’re not quite as comforting as all those placid celestial harpists.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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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Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like

in History, Language | October 14th, 2025

As scholars of ancient texts well know, the reconstruction of lost sources can be a matter of some controversy. In the ancient Hebrew and less ancient Christian Biblical texts, for example, critics find the remnants of many previous texts, seemingly stitched together by occasionally careless editors. Those source texts exist nowhere in any physical form, complete or otherwise. They must be inferred from the traces they have left behind—signatures of diction and syntax, stylistic and thematic preoccupations….

So it is with the study of ancient languages, but since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.

The observation that Sanskrit and ancient European languages like Greek and Latin have significant similarities was first recorded by a Jesuit missionary to Goa, Thomas Stephens, in the sixteenth century, but little was made of it until around 100 years later. A great leap forward came in the mid-nineteenth century when German linguist August Schleicher, under the influence of Hegel, published his Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages. There, Schleicher made an extensive attempt at reconstructing the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, “Proto-Indo-European,” or PIE, for short, thought to have originated somewhere in Eastern Europe, though this supposition is speculative.

To provide an example of what the language might have been like, Schleicher made up a fable called “The Sheep and the Horses” as a “sonic experiment.” The story has been used ever since, “periodically updated,” writes Eric Powell at Archaeology, “to reflect the most current understanding of how this extinct language would have sounded when it was spoken some 6,000 years ago.” Having no access to any texts written in Proto-Indo-European (which may or may not have existed) nor, of course, to any speakers of the language, linguists disagree a good deal on what it should sound like; “no single version can be considered definitive.”

And yet, since Schleicher’s time, the theory has been considerably refined. At the top of the post, you can hear one such refinement based on work by UCLA professor H. Craig Melchert and read by linguist Andrew Byrd. See a translation of Schleicher’s story, “The Sheep and the Horses” below:

A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.” Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

Byrd also reads another story in hypothetical Proto-Indo-European, “The King and the God,” using “pronunciation informed by the latest insights into PIE.”

See Powell’s article at Archaeology for the written transcriptions of both Schleicher’s and Melchert/Byrd’s versions of PIE, and see his article here to learn about the archeological evidence for the Bronze Age speakers of this theoretical linguistic common ancestor.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter

in History, Literature | October 13th, 2025

My Penguin Classics copy of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi sits alone atop an overfull shelf. There is a bookmark on page 204, exactly halfway through, torn from an in-flight duty-free catalog—whiskey and fancy pens. It tells me “hey, you forgot to finish this, you [various obscenities].” And I shrug. What can I say? I went to grad school, where I learned to read ten books at once and never finish one. Good thing Mark Twain didn’t write that way, or we might not have Life on the Mississippi.

Twain was a diligent and conscientious writer with a memory like a bear trap, or at least that’s what he wanted us to think. But somewhere in his reminiscence he may have been confused. Twain wrote in his 1904 autobiography that his first novel written on a typewriter—the first typewritten novel at all—was Tom Sawyer.

Was this so? Twain purchased his first typewriter (which probably looked like the Sholes and Glidden seen here) in 1874 for $125. In 1875, he writes in a letter to the Remington company that he is no longer using his typewriter; it corrupts his morals because it makes him want to swear. He gives the infernal machine away, twice. It returns to him each time.

The year after Twain’s moral trouble with his Remington, Tom Sawyer is published from handwritten manuscript, not typed. Then, seven years later, Life on the Mississippi (1883) comes to the publisher in typescript. Twain did not type it himself—he had presumably renounced the act—but he dictated the memoir to a typist from a handwritten draft. Now, I can hear you quibbling… Life on the Mississippi isn’t a novel at all! Well, okay, fair enough. Let’s just say it’s the first typewritten book and call it a day, eh? Go read this excellent New Yorker piece on the early life of the typewriter and leave me alone. I’ve got a book to finish.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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The Aberdeen Bestiary, One of the Great Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, Now Digitized in High Resolution & Made Available Online

in Books, History | October 9th, 2025

For thousands of years, ordinary people all over the world not only worked side-by-side with domestic animals on a daily basis, they also observed the wild fauna around them to learn how to navigate and survive nature. The closeness produced a keen appreciation for animal behavior that informs the folk tales of every continent and the popular texts of every religion. Our delight in animal stories survives in children’s books, but in grown-up language, animal comparisons tend to be nasty and dehumanizing. The demeaning adjective “bestial” conveys a typical attitude not only toward people we don’t like, but toward the animal world as well. Orwell’s Animal Farm and Kafka’s Metamorphosis have become the standard references for modern animal allegory.

Early literature shows us a range of different attitudes, where animals are treated as equals, with character traits both good and bad, or as noble messengers of a god or gods rather than livestock, moving scenery, or exploitable resources.

We might refer in an eastern context to the Jataka Tales, fables of the Buddha’s many rebirths in the human and animal worlds that provide their readers with moral lessons. In the Christian west, we have the medieval bestiary—compendiums of animals, both real and mythological—that introduced readers to a moral typology through “reading” what early Christians thought of as the “book of nature.”

The most lavish of them all, the Aberdeen Bestiary, which dates from around 1200, was once owned by Henry VIII. Now, the University of Aberdeen has digitized the text and made it freely available to readers online. Beginning with the key creation stories from the book of Genesis, the book then dives into its descriptions of animals, beginning with the lion, the pard (panther), and the elephant.

You’ll notice that these are not animals that your typical medieval European reader would have encountered. One important difference between the bestiary and the fable is that the former draws many of its beasts from hearsay, conjecture, or pure fiction. But the intent is partly the same. These “were teaching tools,” notes Claire Voon at Hyperallergic, and the Aberdeen Bestiary contains illustrated “lengthy tales of moral behavior.”

Like the stories of Aesop, the bestiary presents important lessons, mixing in the fabulous with the naturalist. As Voon describes the Aberdeen Bestiary:

The illustrations are impressively varied, depicting common animals from tiny ants to elephants, as well as fantastic beasts, from the leocrota to the phoenix. Even the moral qualities of the humble sea urchin are honored with paragraphs of discussion. Beyond this array of creatures, the bestiary details the appearances and qualities of various trees, gems, and humans. Some of these may seem comical to 21st-century eyes: a swarm of bees, for instance, resembles an orderly line of shuttlecocks streaming into their hives. Yet other paintings are impressive for their near-accuracy, such as one image of a bat that shows how its membranous wings connect its fingers, legs, and tail. All of these rich details would have helped readers better understand the natural world as it was defined at the time of the book’s creation.

Incredibly ornate and bearing the marks of dozens of scribal hands, the book, historians believe, was originally produced for a wide audience, then taken by Henry’s librarians from a dissolved monastery. Never fully completed, it remained in the Royal Library for 100 years after Henry. “I doubt if the Tudor monarchs took it out for a regular read,” says Aberdeen University professor Jane Geddes. Now an open public document, it returns to its “original purpose of education,” writes Voon, “although for us, of course, it illuminates more about the past than the present.” See the high res scans here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Einstein’s Divorce Letters and the Cruel List of Marital Demands He Imposed on His First Wife

in History, Letters, Science | October 7th, 2025

Albert Einstein is the rare figure who’s universally known, but almost entirely for his professional achievements. Few of us who can explain the theory of relativity can also say much about the personal life of the man who came up with it, though that doesn’t owe to a lack of documentation. Thanks to science YouTuber Toby Hendy, we have, for example, some of the love letters he wrote to the women who constituted a veritable parade through his life. Also, in another video for her channel Tibees, Hendy reads the letters he wrote in the process of divorcing his first wife, the Serbian physicist and mathematician Mileva Marić.

Einstein married Marić in January 1903, says Hendy, “after they had been together for around five years. The relationship was in its prime, and so was the academic productivity. It was in 1905 that Einstein would publish his four major papers that would change the face of physics. By 1912, however, Einstein had started having an affair with his cousin,” Elsa Lowenthal.

By 1914, Einstein wrote to Marić a letter “detailing some conditions of them continuing to live together,” if not quite as man and wife. The conditions read as follows:

CONDITIONS

A. You will make sure:

1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;
3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.

B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:

1. my sitting at home with you;
2. my going out or travelling with you.

C. You will obey the following points in your relations with me:

1. you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;
2. you will stop talking to me if I request it;
3. you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.

D. You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior.

Though they agreed to put this stringent plan into effect, less than two weeks later, he wrote to Elsa, “Yesterday my wife left for good with the children” — and “you, dear little Elsie, will now become my wife and become convinced that it is not at all so hard to live by my side.”

Einstein did marry Lowenthal in 1919, and the union, though hardly characterized by ideal faithfulness, did last until her death in 1935. There would be plenty of other women, but none who played quite the same role in his life as Marić, not only the mother of his children, but also — according to some historians — a collaborator on some of his accomplishments in physics. According to Lost Women of Science, “there is little tangible evidence to support the claims that Marić was a co-author of Einstein’s first major work. That said, there are plenty of personal testimonies from those who knew Marić and Einstein that her involvement was likely.” One condition of their divorce settlement, at any rate, held that Marić receive his Nobel Prize money, were he to win it, which he went on to do a couple of years later. This makes clear that, whatever the importance of her own scientific work, she must’ve had a good head on her shoulders.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Foot-Licking Demons & Other Strange Things in a 1921 Illustrated Manuscript from Iran

in Art, History | October 3rd, 2025

Few modern writers so remind me of the famous Virginia Woolf quote about fiction as a “spider’s web” more than Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attaches his labyrinths is a librarian’s life; the strands that anchor his fictions are the obscure scholarly references he weaves throughout his text. Borges brings this tendency to whimsical employ in his nonfiction Book of Imaginary Beings, a heterogeneous compendium of creatures from ancient folktale, myth, and demonology around the world.

Borges himself sometimes remarks on how these ancient stories can float too far away from ratiocination. The “absurd hypotheses” regarding the mythical Greek Chimera, for example, “are proof” that the ridiculous beast “was beginning to bore people…. A vain or foolish fancy is the definition of Chimera that we now find in dictionaries.” Of what he calls “Jewish Demons,” a category too numerous to parse, he writes, “a census of its population left the bounds of arithmetic far behind.

Throughout the centuries, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia all enriched this teeming middle world.” Although a lesser field than angelology, the influence of this fascinatingly diverse canon only broadened over time.

“The natives recorded in the Talmud” soon became “thoroughly integrated” with the many demons of Christian Europe and the Islamic world, forming a sprawling hell whose denizens hail from at least three continents, and who have mixed freely in alchemical, astrological, and other occult works since at least the 13th century and into the present. One example from the early 20th century, a 1902 treatise on divination from Isfahan, a city in central Iran, draws on this ancient thread with a series of watercolors added in 1921 that could easily be mistaken for illustrations from the early Middle Ages.

As the Public Domain Review notes:

The wonderful images draw on Near Eastern demonological traditions that stretch back millennia — to the days when the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud asserted it was a blessing demons were invisible, since, “if the eye would be granted permission to see, no creature would be able to stand in the face of the demons that surround it.”

The author of the treatise, a rammal, or soothsayer, himself “attributes his knowledge to the Biblical Solomon, who was known for his power over demons and spirits,” writes Ali Karjoo-Ravary, now an assistant professor of Islamic history at Columbia University. Predating Islam, “the depiction of demons in the Near East… was frequently used for magical and talismanic purposes,” just as it was by occultists like Aleister Crowley at the time these illustrations were made.

“Not all of the 56 painted illustrations in the manuscript depict demonic beings,” the Public Domain Review points out. “Amongst the horned and fork-tongued we also find the archangels Jibrāʾīl (Gabriel) and Mikāʾīl (Michael), as well as the animals — lion, lamb, crab, fish, scorpion — associated with the zodiac.” But in the main, it’s demon city. What would Borges have made of these fantastic images? No doubt, had he seen them, and he had seen plenty of their like before he lost his sight, he would have been delighted.

A blue man with claws, four horns, and a projecting red tongue is no less frightening for the fact that he’s wearing a candy-striped loincloth. In another image we see a moustachioed goat man with tuber-nose and polka dot skin maniacally concocting a less-than-appetising dish. One recurring (and worrying) theme is demons visiting sleepers in their beds, scenes involving such pleasant activities as tooth-pulling, eye-gouging, and — in one of the most engrossing illustrations — a bout of foot-licking (performed by a reptilian feline with a shark-toothed tail).

There’s a playful Boschian quality to all of this, but while we tend to see Bosch’s work from our perspective as absurd, he apparently took his bizarre inventions absolutely seriously. So too, we might assume, did the illustrator here. We might wonder, as Woolf did, about this work as the product of “suffering human beings… attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” What kinds of ordinary, material concerns might have afflicted this artist, as he (we presume) imagined demons gouging the eyes and licking the feet of people tucked safely in their beds?

See many more of these strange paintings at the Public Domain Review.