Hear the First Book of Homer’s Iliad Read Aloud in the Original Greek

in History, Language, Literature | June 4th, 2026

You can, of course, learn the Greek language as it’s spoken today. You can also learn Greek as it was spoken in antiquity — and as it was, until fairly recently in historical time, taught to students in the modern West. But it’s a fairly different endeavor again to learn Greek as Homer spoke it. The fact of the matter is that no human being ever really spoke like Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Penelope, or any of the other characters in the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer’s many literary achievements through these works include the creation and command of a kind of synthesized poetic Greek, combining qualities of regional Ionic and Aeolic dialects with various forms and expressions that were outdated even in the eighth century BC. If it served the meter, Homer used it.

Needless to say, when most of us attempt to read Homer aloud in the original, we get it all or mostly wrong, even if we’re familiar with modern Greek. We’d have to spend a long time indeed in the world of classicists before hearing a more accurate recording than the one above, delivered by a YouTuber called Thomas Whichello.

On his channel, Whichello specializes in performing venerable literary texts with a pronunciation and cadence as close to period-accurate as possible, often in the original language, sometimes with his own musical accompaniment. He’s done readings of the Bible, Shakespeare, Keats, and Wilde, but none so far has been so popular as his rendition of the first book of the Iliad, accompanied by subtitles of Homer’s text and an English translation.

A Greek here in 2026 with no particular knowledge of the classical language may understand a quarter of the individual words Whichello uses, and maybe half of them in certain passages. Actually being able to follow the story, however, is another matter. Still, you can get a surprising amount out of the video even if you understand nothing at all, since Whichello is aiming not just for linguistic accuracy, but also emotional resonance in his delivery. Ignore his glasses, button-down shirt, microphone, and window frame, and you could almost be sitting around a campfire with him nearly 30 centuries ago. Note, also, that the commenters include genuine classicists who call his the best reading they’ve ever heard — as well as viewers, credentialed or otherwise, eager to hear him name all those mighty Achaean ships in Book 2.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

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

An Introduction to the Islamic World: 1,000 Years of History in 19 Minutes

in History, Religion | June 2nd, 2026

References to Islam in major media can make it sound monolithic and eternal. But it’s actually a much younger and less unified phenomenon than many of us imagine, especially if we happen to live outside the Middle East. As a religion, it dates back “only” to the seventh century, when it was founded by the Prophet Muhammad. As an engine of large-scale civilization, Islam took a bit longer to come into its own, and it hasn’t stopped undergoing divisions, transformations, declines, and rebirths since. Here on Open Culture, we recently featured a video from YouTube channel How So covering 1,000 years of medieval European history in 20 minutes. The one above does the same thing for the Islamic world’s first millennium, ending with the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

After he united the formerly polytheistic Arab tribes under his new faith, Muhammad lived for a decade longer. His death in the year 632 marked the last time that every believer in Islam would have been on the same page. It was at that point that the title caliph, or successor, was defined, and the first four caliphs after Muhammad held power for thirty years, the period in which the first Muslim state emerged.

The caliphate, as their territory was called, expanded widely across and out of the Arabian Peninsula, into the territories of the Byzantine and Sassanian empires. Supporters of the early caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib argued that he was the true heir to Islam, and detractors that he wasn’t. Eventually, the former group became known as the Shias, and the latter as the Sunnis, the two sides of a schism of which practically everyone today has heard.

Lesser known to the general public are the Umayyads, Abbasids, Buyids, and Fatimids, all of them major players in the continuing expansion of Islam well into the Middle Ages. But the still-familiar place names of Damascus, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Constantinople (or, as we know it, Istanbul) are just as important in these chapters of the story of Islam, and without understanding that religion, it’s impossible to understand the diverse forms that civilization has taken in those places and others in the wider region of the world around them. The crisis of authority that began setting in after Muhammad’s death has, in some sense, persisted for nearly fourteen centuries now, more than long enough to have become a defining characteristic of the Islamic world. What shape its societies will take over the next millennium, it would surely take a prophet to know.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Tour of Athens’ Acropolis, Explained with 3D Reconstructions

in Architecture, History | May 28th, 2026

Since it was first built as a Mycenaean fortress in the thirteenth century BC, what we now know as the Acropolis has been used to worship not just Greek gods, but also, in later periods, the Virgin Mary and Allah. Now, of course, with its days of military and religious functions long behind it, it stands as a set of ruins. Still, they’re very popular ruins, as evidenced by the crowds captured in the video above from Manuel Bravo. Though most tourists at the Acropolis come with the idea that its buildings would have looked more glorious in the distant past, few can have much of a sense of how to imagine that with any accuracy. Using 3D models, Bravo integrates views of how the Parthenon, the Temple of Athena Nike, and other structures look now with how they would have looked in Athens’ golden age.

To fully appreciate the Acropolis requires not just an idea of how it was originally intended to look, as Bravo emphasizes, but also the intentions of ancient Greek architecture. The approach up the hill was meant to feel like an ascent from the mundane world into the sacred one.

Entering the central space on top, the visitor was led to viewing points that showed the surrounding collection of buildings at their most dramatic, a design the architects might have described as cinematic, had cinema existed at the time. Even in its ruined state, the Acropolis still transmits a sense of how, where, and to what degree that visitor was meant to be filled with awe, as well as where he was meant to look. And nothing up there — at least in the absence of Phidias’ thirty-foot statue Athena Promachos — draws attention as deliberately as the Parthenon.

As we previously noted here on Open Culture, if you make the trip to the Acropolis yourself, you can now see the Parthenon without scaffolding (or, depending on when you go, a minimum of scaffolding) for the first time in 200 years. That lack of obstruction makes it easier to envision the glories of that celebrated building back when it was both the temple of Athena and the treasury of Athens. But as Bravo says, if you really want to gaze upon the Parthenon as the ancients knew it, marbles and all, you’ll have to make the trek out to Nashville, Tennessee, where a full-scale replica was built in 1897 for the city’s Centennial Exposition. It may feel a bit odd to turn up in a place known for country music and bachelorette parties in search of the architectural, and perhaps spiritual foundation of Europe. But then, civilization has never taken a predictable course.

A 3D Model Reveals What the Parthenon and Its Interior Looked Like 2,500 Years Ago

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Take a Random Walk Around the Berlin Wall Just Months Before Its Sudden Fall (Summer 1989)

in History, Travel | May 27th, 2026

Officially, the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. Demolition would take more than four years, and a few sections remain for memorial purposes, but it was on that date that passage between East and West Berlin — and thus East and West Germany — opened to all citizens of both countries. To say that it came as a surprise would be a serious understatement. Earlier that year, even the best informed observers were predicting that the wall would stand for at least a few more decades. Earlier that day, for that matter, the officials involved in the opening didn’t foresee that Socialist Unity Party of Germany Secretary of Information Günter Schabowski would, that evening, mistakenly declare on national television that the liberalization of border travel was effective “immediately, without delay.”

When the border guards finally gave up their attempts to hold the line around 11:00 that night, the surrounding scene in both Berlins had turned into what attendees now remember, 36 years later, as the biggest street festival of their lives. To those of us unable to join in the celebration at the time, it may seem unlikely that such an event could really have occurred with no intimations whatsoever.

Yet the footage shot by a traveler in Berlin during the summer of 1989, right there in the vicinity of the wall, depicts a city where events seem to be frozen. Though the built environment isn’t without touches of faded grandeur here and there (and as many West Berliners were soon to discover, the real urban stateliness was over East), the overall impression given by what was then the red hot center of Cold War geopolitics is that of a dullsville.

The most outwardly interesting feature in these parts of Berlin at the very end of the nineteen-eighties is, of course, the wall itself: the brutishness of its form, the humdrum menace of its guards, the accumulation of graffiti both political and apolitical. At one point, the tourist’s camcorder captures the memorials for fallen wall jumpers, the most recent of which, a certain Chris Gueffroy, had made his fateful escape attempt from the East that past February. History would soon immortalize him as the last person to be shot trying to get over the wall, though not the last to die doing so. That title belongs to Winfried Freudenberg, who in March of 1989 fell from a balloon he’d rigged up to fly across the border. At this point, when the rapid urban evolution of the reunified German capital has long since made it one of the most popular cities in Europe, neither she nor Gueffroy would recognize the former East Berlin they were desperate to escape — nor, for that matter, the West Berlin of which they dreamed.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Who Would Be King of the United States If George Washington Had Become a Monarch?

in History | May 25th, 2026

The young George Washington may never have hacked up his father’s cherry tree and refused to lie about it, but his life nevertheless offers plenty of deeds both virtuous and adequately documented. It was no small thing, for instance, to refuse to seek a third term as the first President of the United States of America — much less to exchange that title for “King of the United States of America.” As every enthusiast of American history knows, this set the precedent, only once violated and thereafter written into law, of a two-term limit. But as every enthusiast of alternate American history has wondered, what would have happened had Washington become king? And if the U.S. monarchy had remained intact for the past 227 years, who would rule it today?

In the UsefulCharts video above, Matt Baker explains a series of different succession scenarios. While none is highly plausible in itself, they together give an idea of the lines along which American monarchical history could have played out, at least assuming that every other event played out exactly the same way as it has in our reality.

One of the first complicating factors is that Washington himself had no biological descendants. Given that, we can trace down a theoretical royal lineage starting with his adopted son, born from his wife Martha’s first marriage; with the nephew he selected as the primary heir of his estate; or with the senior-most heir of his father (owner of the notional cherry tree). Not that any of those major paths through the chart of Washington’s indirect descendants is necessarily straightforward either.

The whole matter seems at least as complicated as figuring out who would be the Roman emperor if Rome had never fallen, an exercise Baker works through in another UsefulCharts video previously featured here on Open Culture. The possibilities for the American monarch in 2026 come down to King Robert III, or Robert E. Lee V (and great-great grandson of Robert E. Lee); Queen Brynda, or Brynda Hansen; King Richard, or Richard Washington; and King Larry II, or Lawrence Shaffner, the descendant of George Washington’s nephew Bushrod. Baker finds that Shaffner is the most convincing candidate for the job, which is hard to deny. Even apart from the relevant familial, political, and legal factors, consider that name again. King Larry: apart from the title, how much more American could it possibly sound?

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Spread of Christianity Animated, from Antiquity Until Today, on an Animated Map

in History, Religion | May 21st, 2026

Christianity has long been closely identified with Western civilization. The association is especially strong, in modern times, with the United States of America, that source of derisively quoted, quite possibly apocryphal arguments that “if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for our children.” But of course, Jesus never heard a word of English, and though the spread of the religion named after him did shift into high gear not long after his death — to say nothing of after Constantine’s — it took its sweet time getting to the American continent. In fact, it doesn’t show up there until more than five and a half minutes into the new eight-minute video from Ollie Bye above, which animates Christianity’s historical propagation on a world map.

It’s a world map by the end, in any case: the view zooms out as the reach of Christianity increases, starting with the region we now call the Middle East and ending up with every continent on display, none of them untouched save Antarctica (which actually does have eight churches of its own). Remarkable though it is that this first-century “desert religion” has taken root in such a variety of environments, cultures, and societies, it hasn’t come through that process completely unchanged.

Indeed, Bye’s map includes a running legend of its major variants, from Nicene, Celtic, and Chalcedonian Christianity early on to Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist, and many more in our time. It makes less sense to speak of the spread of Christianity, perhaps, than the spread of Christianities.

In the singular or the plural, what has made all this so adaptable to such a wide variety of human settings? Christianity’s non-ethnic universalism surely has something to do with it, as does the broad emotional resonance of its core narratives of sin, salvation, and rebirth. The assiduous translation of its texts and outward march of missionaries and other carriers of the gospel has been going on almost since the very beginning. Throughout its history, Christianity has also shown the versatility to thrive as a clandestine underground movement, a state religion, and everything in between. All the while, it has assimilated qualities of the civilizations it enters, from Greco-Roman philosophy to Celtic festivals to Korean shamanistic traditions. In fact, I’m writing this very post from one of the many church cafés in Seoul, as convincing an experience as to underscore Christianity’s improbable — and continuing — endurance.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

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

Hand-Colored Photographs from 19th Century Japan: 110 Images Capture the Waning Days of Traditional Japanese Society

in History, Photography | May 20th, 2026

What we euphemistically refer to as the “Opening of Japan” catalyzed a period of seismic upheaval for the proud formerly closed country. Between the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1853 and the Meiji restoration in 1868, Japanese society changed rapidly due to the sudden forced influx of foreign capital and influence, much of it destructive. “Unemployment rose,” writes historian John W. Dower, “Domestic prices soared sky high…. Much of Japan was wracked by famine in the mid 1860s…. As if all this were not curse enough, the foreigners also brought cholera with them.” They also brought photography, and both Western and Japanese photographers documented not only the country’s profound transformation, but also its traditional dress and culture.

Closed for 200 years, Japan became a source of endless fascination for Westerners as artifacts made their way across the sea. Among them was “an extensive photographic documentation of Japan,” notes the New York Public Library, and “of interaction between the Japanese and foreigners” (Commodore Perry’s expedition to Tokyo Bay included a daguerreotype photographer.)

“In the broadest sense, photography entered Asia from Europe and America as part of the process of colonialism, but soon took root in those regions with local photographers.”

The colorized images you see here come from the NYPL’s large collection of late 19th century Japanese photography, taken by photographers like the Italian-British Felice Beato and his Japanese student Kimbei, who “assisted Beato in the hand-coloring of photographs until 1863,” then “set up his own large and flourishing studio in Yokohama in 1881.” The archive provides “a rich resource for the understanding of the political, social, economic, and artistic history of Asia from the 1870s to the early 20th century.” These images date from between 1890 and 1909, by which time much of Japan had already been extensively westernized in dress, architecture, and style of government.

To many Japanese, the old ways, sustained through a couple hundred years of isolation, must have seemed in danger of slipping away. To many Westerners, however, the encounter with Japan offered a kind of cultural renewal. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art points out, “a tidal wave of foreign imports” from Asia, including “woodcut prints by masters of the ukiyo‑e school… transformed Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.” European collectors, traders, and artists discovered a mania for all things Japanese, even as some of its cultural forms threatened to disappear. Enter the NYPL’s digital collection, Photographs of Japan, 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 ( None ) |

Every Book of the Bible Explained in One Video

in Books, History, Religion | May 19th, 2026

Whether we’re religious or not, we can all agree that the Bible isn’t just a book. In fact, it’s at least 66 of them, 39 Old Testament and 27 in the New, and that’s just in the Protestant tradition. Even if you’ve never read a single page of the Bible, you may well have a decent idea of what quite a few of those books contain: the stories of Adam, Eve, Noah, and the creation in Genesis; the plagues and Moses parting the Red Sea in Exodus; the various depictions of Jesus in the Gospels that define his popular image; the apocalyptic grotesqueries of Revelation. That’s even likelier to be true if you watch Hochelaga, the YouTube channel that just came out with a new video explaining all those stories and everything in between.

The result is long, to be sure, but not as long as you might expect: Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny manages to cover the 66 books of the Bible in two hours, the length of an ordinary feature film. For visuals, he draws upon the history of Western art, whose connections with Christianity and penchant for depicting the religion’s central events goes without saying.

In the case of biblical figures like Jonah, Job, or Lot’s wife (before or after her conversion into a pillar of salt), we’ve developed our own mental images at least through cultural osmosis, informed or not by the visions of Renaissance masters. But how many of us can call so easily scenes from the books of Obadiah, Haggai, or Philemon up in our mind’s eye?

This video may prove most helpful in providing a “big picture” of the Bible, allowing viewers with no experience of biblical scholarship to place isolated episodes to which they’ve heard references all their lives in context with each other. And yet, it’s also entirely possible that they’ll come out of these two hours wondering to what extent all these parts really fit together in the first place. Collected from material originally written over centuries and in various forms, not to mention passed through the vagaries of translation, the Bible could hardly be expected to present itself with polished coherence. Whether or not you believe it contains the word of God, you could well feel ready, after Hochelaga’s overview, to grapple with its text in all its linguistic richness, its surprising contradictions, and its moral grandeur — as well as its more-than-occasional strangeness.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear the First Book of Homer’s Iliad Read Aloud in the Original Greek

An Introduction to the Islamic World: 1,000 Years of History in 19 Minutes

A Tour of Athens’ Acropolis, Explained with 3D Reconstructions

Take a Random Walk Around the Berlin Wall Just Months Before Its Sudden Fall (Summer 1989)

Who Would Be King of the United States If George Washington Had Become a Monarch?

The Spread of Christianity Animated, from Antiquity Until Today, on an Animated Map

Hand-Colored Photographs from 19th Century Japan: 110 Images Capture the Waning Days of Traditional Japanese Society

Every Book of the Bible Explained in One Video

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