More OA

Alun Politics No Comments ,

Chuck Jones has poin­ted me to ABZU as a source of open-access mater­ial. It’s been hugely use­ful / dis­tract­ing already and I have another paper I need to write up on Greek fest­ivals now. It’s wonderful.

…but I’m also hav­ing a very strange day with the journ­als. It seems the Feb­ru­ary 2005 edi­tion of the Journal of Social Archae­ology is open today. I men­tion it as it has the paper The cul­tural land­scape of inter­plan­et­ary space by Alice Gor­man avail­able for free. It’s an inter­est­ing take on the space race, nation­al­ism and archaeology.

There’s a good vari­ety of top­ics in the issue, so grab it while you can get it.

Suicide is ageless

Alun The Past 2 Comments , , , , ,


Base image: Sui­cide © iStockPhoto.com.

A press release from the Royal Soci­ety of Psy­chi­at­rists. Repro­duced because I’ve only seen snip­pets of it the Scot­tish press.

“Death is by my sight today, like a well trod­den way…
Death is by my sight today, like the long­ing of a man
to see home…
I am laden with misery…”

Ana­lysis of an ancient Egyp­tian poem by a psy­chi­at­rist and an Egypto­lo­gist shows that it describes the psy­cho­path­o­logy of sui­cide with great accuracy.

Dis­pute over Sui­cide was a poem writ­ten by an unnamed Egyp­tian writer between 2000 and 1740 BC on papyrus in hieroglyphics.

The writer is known as ‘The Elo­quent Peas­ant’, and was com­mis­sioned by King Meri-ka-re to write a poem in order to dis­suade people from com­mit­ting sui­cide.
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