Late in the book he reports a conversation with Imre Galambos, which has some interesting ramfications about language, perception, and culture (cf. Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass):

It’s all connected: menus and bootlegs, history and movies, language and archaeology.  Texts create meaning, regardless of how arbitrary the process may seem.  ”What is reality?” Galambos asks, during one of our conversations in Beijing.  ”It’s this huge amount of data.  There’s this philosopher who had a lot of influence on me, Ernst Cassirer.  He wrote this book called Language and Myth.  Basically, his idea is that language itself creates reality.  For example, in order to have words like nouns, you have to have concepts.  When you form concepts, that’s when you’re creating stuff–it’s a creative process.  You pick out certain things from the environment, and you give them labels, and you create this reality around you.  When you’re a kid, you’re not just learning how to speak; you’re learning how to perceive a reality.  It’s almost like a computer language, an internal code that makes you able to think.

“From a linguistic point of view, this is a very old concept, and a lot of people nowadays don’t believe it.  But I think it’s probably to some degree true.  Perhaps if you don’t have a word for a certain feeling, or a certain color of the sky, then you don’t notice it.  It doesn’t stick out from the background.  That’s what words do: they make things stick out.  Otherwise, it might just be a big haze of data.  In a computer language, you’d call it uninterpreted data.  So a language is your browser.”  (pp. 444-445)

A report on recent work at Bathonea, a port city and playground of the ancient elite near Istanbul.  The site is immense; the sea wall alone is multiple miles long.  This site will yield insights into Byzantine, Roman, and Greek civilization for years to come.

Istanbul Yields a Treasure Trove in Ancient Bathonea – NYTimes.com.

Underwater archaeology: Hunt for the ancient mariner : Nature

Imperial Romes Great Ancient Seaport City | Popular Archaeology – exploring the past.

Ancient advice (literally!) on how to win an election – Political Bookworm – The Washington Post.

In case any hadn’t heard there is nothing new under the sun.

History is always selective.  In the words of Imre Galambos (as reported by Peter Hessler in Oracle Bones), “In order to write a story, and create meaning out of events, you deny other possible interpretations.  The history of . . any great culture [is] written at the expense of other stories that have remained silent.”  History never gives us the full picture under the best of circumstances, and under the worst history can be manipulated.  Like archaeology, history is always political.

Vladimir Putin’s Risky Ploy to Manufacture History – Fiona Hill & Clifford G. Gaddy – International – The Atlantic.