Watch the World’s First Film in Babylonian, The Poor Man of Nippur

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“Enable subtitles,” says the notification that appears before The Poor Man of Nippur — and you will need them, unless, of course, you happen to hail from the cradle of civilization. The short film is adapted from “a folktale based on a 2,700-year-old poem about a pauper,” says the University of Cambridge’s alumni…

Discover Edo, the Historic Green/Sustainable City of Japan

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When you picture modern day Tokyo, what comes to mind?

The electronic billboards of Shibuya and Shinjuku?

The teeming streets?

The maid cafes?

The robot hotel?

A 97 square foot micro apartment?

Bernard Guerrini‘s documentary Naturopolis – Tokyo, from megalopolis to…

Understanding Espresso: A Six-Part Series Explaining What It Takes to Pull the Ideal Shot

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It doesn’t take long to learn how to pull a shot of espresso. Search for that phrase on Youtube, and you’ll find hours’ worth of sound instruction, most of it in the form of brief and easily digestible videos. All of them cover the same basic stages of the process: grinding, dosing, tamping,…

Listen to The Epic of Gilgamesh Being Read in its Original Ancient Language, Akkadian

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Creative Commons image by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin

Long ago, in the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia, Akkadian was the dominant language. And, for centuries, it remained the lingua franca in the Ancient Near East. But then it was gradually squeezed out by Aramaic, and it faded into oblivion once Alexander…

A Medieval Arabic Manuscript Features the Designs for a “Perpetual Flute” and Other Ingenious Mechanical Devices

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In the late twelfth and early thirteenth century there lived a mechanically inclined polymath named Badi’ al-Zaman Abu-‘l-‘Izz Ibn Isma’il Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, whom we might prefer simply to call Al-Jazari. A resident of Diyar-Bakir, in modern-day Turkey, he was employed as a court engineer, and indeed, proved to be the finest…