Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Sunday, September 13th, 2015
The principal cause of the ‘End of Sumer’ was the influx of new people. It has already been noted that there had always been, so far as we can tell, a mixture of populations in the Land. Besides the ethnic Sumerians (the original speakers of Sumerian) themselves, there is strong ...
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Tuesday, March 10th, 2015
The People (sag-giga)
The principal identity of the people seems to have been with the city itself. One sign of this is the tendency to take names incorporating the name of the city.[1] There is no evidence that alternative identities actually opposed to the city played any significant role in Sumerian ...
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Tuesday, February 24th, 2015
In this period there seems to have been increasing disillusionment with operation of a system in which the institutions of the temple were held to be mainly responsible for ensuring economic security for the citizens. The cause of this is likely to have been the increasing influence of individual interests, ...
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Sunday, February 22nd, 2015
The structure of the administration of Ur III and some of its administrative initiatives also played a role in avoiding internal rebellions. Many of these features of Ur III were foreshadowed in the structure and administration of the Akkadian empire, but appear to have been much more thorough and perhaps ...
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Thursday, January 15th, 2015
Architecture
Ur-Nammu’s determination to display his piety and to repair the damage done by the Guti (or by neglect in the interregnum) showed itself in reconstruction efforts all over Sumer in the name of his god ad of the local gods of the cities. Most elements of the architecture, such as ...
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Friday, December 26th, 2014
Retention of bindu
In its earliest formulations, hatHa was used to raise and conserve the physical essence of life, identified in men as bindu (semen), which is otherwise constantly dripping downward from a store in the head and being expended. (The female equivalent, mentioned only occasionally in our sources, is rajas, ...
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Friday, December 19th, 2014
The mudras (seals) of the Hathayogapradipika compiled by Svatmaraman about 1450 AD, are not original to that work, but are also to be found in the following works which predate the HYP.
(A1) Amrtasiddhi – 11th C
(D) Dattatreyayogasastra – 13th C
(V) Vivekamartanda – 13th C
(G) Goraksasataka – 13th C
(K) Khecarividya – ...
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Wednesday, December 17th, 2014
The history of the specifically postural yoga that is the root of the yogas that are practiced in the modern West is not well known. We know that most forms of current Western practice can be traced back to the teachers Vivekananda, Yogananda, Sivananda, Kuvalayananda, Hariharananda, Krishnamacharya, and a few ...
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Sunday, November 30th, 2014
I knew that Frazer’s claim in his Golden Bough of a widespread myth of a dying and resurrected god had been heavily discounted amongst later researchers, but I still thought that the general template he presented was applicable to a significant number of myths, and not just around the Mediterranean. ...
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Thursday, November 6th, 2014
Over the course of several centuries beginning in the early 15th (probably) in the South of England (probably) there were a series of regular unconditioned (= not affected by their phonetic environment) vowel changes that affected the long vowels of ME. Those vowels were raised - or if they were ...
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