London's "Walkie Talkie" Wins this Year's Carbuncle Cup

This truly ghastly building, 20 Fenchurch Street by Rafael Viñoly, has won this year's Carbuncle Cup for the ugliest new building in Britain. The Guardian called it a "thuggish comedy villain of a building." Critic Owen Hatherley compared it to an equally horrible building in Paris:

What do the Tour Montparnasse in Paris, designed and built in the early 1970s by a large, anonymous committee headed by Eugene Beaudouin, and 20 Fenchurch Street – also known as the Walkie Talkie – by (and very much by) Rafael Viñoly have in common?

The most obvious answer would be "they're both massive, horrible and unavoidable", but they're also cousins in causing people to wish for their destruction almost immediately after construction.

One member of the committee that awarded the Carbuncle Cup, Ike Ijeh, called the Walkie Talkie "a gratuitous glass gargoyle graffitied onto the skyline of London," and concluded, "It should never have been built." Another, Eleanor Jolliffe, described it as a "Bond villain tower, as it could melt your car with a solar beam from space".

That last bit is a reference to an unexpected effect created by the building's curved facade:

Claims surfaced over the weekend that the glare from the curvaceous glass facade of the 37-storey tower - currently under construction at 20 Fenchurch Street - have caused vehicle paintwork to melt and bodywork to distort.

Engineer Eddie Cannon, who parked his Vauxhall Vevaro beneath the building, told local newspaper City AM: "The van looks a total mess – every bit of plastic on the left hand side and everything on the dashboard has melted, including a bottle of Lucozade that looks like it has been baked."

This led to the addition of fins designed to break up the light beam to the facade, and this seems to have made the problem more manageable.

But now there are claims that the building creates particularly strong wind gusts, which are a common problem around very tall buildings, but in this case are said to be knocking people down.

So, it's ugly and a menace on multiple levels. The Guardian:

Responsible for a catalogue of catastrophes, it is hard to imagine a building causing more damage if it tried. It stands at 20 Fenchurch Street, way outside the city’s planned “cluster” of high-rise towers, on a site never intended for a tall building. It looms thuggishly over its low-rise neighbours like a broad-shouldered banker in a cheap pinstriped suit. And it gets fatter as it rises, to make bigger floors at the more lucrative upper levels, forming a literal diagram of greed.

And yet it was built, and now London is stuck with it.

Some Strange New Data on European Genetic History

A new article in Current Biology by George Busby et al. purports to show a lot of comparatively recent genetic mixing among the populations of Europe and West Asia. (This is a completely different phenomenon from the great ancient invasions I have written about before.) Some of the data they present makes sense; for example, you can see a minor flow of genes from northwestern Europe (Franks) into the Basque population around the year 1000, and a significant flow of genes from central Asia into Turkey between 1000 and 1500. They identify the entry of Slavs into southeastern Europe via two clusters of genes, one similar to modern Lithuanians and the other to modern Germans, that entered between 700 and 1200. Everybody invaded the west Caucasus.

But what is one to make of the supposed flow of "southern Italian-like" genes into Britain between 500 and 1000 AD? Or of genes from "Armenian-like sources" into Orkney? Or Mordovian (relatives of the Hungarians) genes into Norway? Of "Cypriot-like" genes into northern Italy?

I think there is something wrong with their statistics, but I don't really understand their methods well enough to say what. One issue is that they rely on randomly sampled modern populations to generate their base lines, rather than trying to identify people who have resided in a particular area for generations. Another is that particular historical events may confuse the notion of where genes "originate." Surely the "southern Italian-like" genes they identify in Britain and Orkney are more likely to be Viking genes carried to southern Italy by Normans in the 11th century and later; I wouldn't have thought that the Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily involved enough people to leave a clear genetic signature, but who knows? I can't think of any other explanation.

What I really believe is that there has been so much mixing of populations across west Asia over the past 2000 years that it will be all but impossible to tease out the actual percentages of genes that Group A contributed to Region B at any particular time. But the data do show lots of mixing; there is no population in Europe or West Asia, not even the Basques or Norwegians, that seems to have remained "pure" since classical times.

The Scribes of Enuma Anu Enlil

Shelves of the library of the 'Scribes of Enuma Anu Enlil' at Sippar in southern Iraq. This archive was constructed in the 6th century BCE. The tablets stored here were mainly astronomical texts and treatises on the interpretation of omens. More at the British Museum.

The Seed Man

This strange little object was made in Italy around 1600 and is now in the Walters Museum. According to them, these "seed men" were a common sort of novelty among rich Italians of the time; the curators relate them to the fruit and vegetable portraits painted by artists like Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

The Neurologist and his Mother

Andrew Scull:

In 1951, when Oliver Sacks was eighteen and about to go up to Oxford, his father, a general practitioner beloved by his patients, decided to have a conversation with him about his sexuality. Oliver had no apparent liking for the opposite sex, and on being quizzed about this, confessed that he preferred boys, but added "I have never 'done' anything". As he recounts in his memoir, the next morning his mother confronted him: "You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born". She then proceeded to ignore him for days, and during the rest of her long life, never again alluded to the matter. Sacks tries to excuse her as a child of her time and culture. She was born and raised an Orthodox Jew, and for nearly two decades more, homosexual relations remained a criminal offence under English law. . . . Sacks writes: "My mother did not mean to be cruel, to wish me dead . . . and she probably regretted her words". Sadly, one cannot be sure. Such is the power of prejudice. And I suspect that at his very core, Sacks is not sure either, and that his whole life has been shadowed by this knowledge, the hatred he felt directed at him by someone he deeply loved and whose approval he desperately needed but could not have. Indeed, he immediately says as much: "her words", he informs us, "haunted me for much of my life."

It is not just that such an intimate condemnation of something that was central to his identity "played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality". Perhaps it also lies behind the decade and more of self-destructive behavior that on many occasions came close to killing him (and might well have brought about the demise of patients entrusted to him as a fledgling physician, since much of the time he was addicted to and high on a variety of drugs and hallucinogens).

From the June 5 TLS.

This makes me wonder again about the part played by trauma and misery in shaping the careers of hugely successful people. Oliver Sacks may have endured decades of lonely, guilt-ridden celibacy, self-treated with dangerous drugs, but his books have given vast pleasure and glimpses of deep understanding to me and millions of others. Would a happy, well-adjusted man have written them? Richard Feynman thought that the best physicists were people who had experienced some awful loss that made them turn away from the world and live mainly in their own heads for years afterward. The miserably mad artist has become a cliche -- this same issue of the TLS includes a review of a collection of scholarly articles about David Foster Wallace, whose suicide seems to have solidified his reputation as the most serious American writer of my generation.

Joyce: Joy and woe are woven fine.

What Might Have Happened in Washington

Gail Collins on the resignation of House Speaker John Boehner:

Boehner’s leave-taking is a bit more of a mixed bag. The surprise announcement came the day after he sat proudly in the background while Pope Francis gave his address to Congress. You will not be stunned to hear that crying occurred, none of it involving Francis.

And there was a private meeting, in which reliable sources said the pope admired Boehner’s tie. But there is no indication he grabbed the speaker by the shoulders and cried: “You’re surrounded by crazy people! Get out while you can, my son!”

Not that it couldn’t have happened. The pope is infallible.

Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri

Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri is an aboriginal artist from a very remote part of Australia:

Until he was in his 20s, he and his family, part of the Pintupi Aboriginal group, lived in a part of the Western Australian desert so remote that even after other Pintupi were forcibly relocated into settlements in the 1950s and 1960s, his family remained out of view, hunting lizards and wearing no clothes except for human-hair belts, as their ancestors had for tens of thousands of years. When they were encountered by chance in 1984 and persuaded to move to a Pintupi community, they instantly became famous, known in newspaper accounts as the Pintupi Nine and described as the last “lost tribe.”

Tjapaltjarri has been painting on canvas since the 1980s, and this month he has his first solo show in New York. How about that for a personal journey, from the last lost tribe to Salon 94? Tjapaltjarri is a healer and story-teller among his people, and also a political leader of sorts, given his extensive connections with outsiders and (comparative) wealth.

Tjapaltjarri's painting on canvas is based on the designs his people traditionally painted on their spears, or their own bodies. They are composed of dots arranged in lines, as you can see in the detail directly above.

Randy Kennedy:

The lines and switchbacks, painted on linen canvas while it is flat on the ground, correspond to mythical stories about the Pintupi and the formation of the desert world in which they live. Some of the stories, which are told in song, can be painted for public consumption, but others are too sacred or powerful to be revealed to outsiders. “My land, my country,” said Mr. Tjapaltjarri, the only English words he uttered during an interview, pointing at a painting with a circle made out of dots. He said it represented a group of ancestral women who appear only at night in the desert around Lake Mackay, a vast saltwater flat that is the primary focus of his paintings.

The way that the lines and curves tell the stories remains mostly a mystery. “I’ve been asking that question for 40 years, and I’ve never really gotten the same answer twice — it’s very inside knowledge,” said Fred R. Myers, an anthropologist at New York University who has studied the Pintupi and their art since the early 1970s and as a doctoral student helped bring attention to the Papunya Tula Artists cooperative, which is owned and directed by Aboriginal people from the Western Desert. “The paintings operate more like mnemonic devices than like representations of a narrative.”

 Tjapaltarri's recent work is all untitled, but some of his older pieces have names; this is Tingari Men's Travels to Tjuntulpul, 1999.

I find these strange but quite wonderful. The hypnotic effect of the large canvases must be very impressive.

Fewer Americans Living with Partners, Except among the Elderly

Based on the latest data from the Census Bureau. Note the dramatic decline in the marriage/partnering rate for people 20 to 24, from 39% to 14% since 1980.

Ben Carson, Islam, and Democracy

Ben Carson is getting a lot of flack for saying that he thinks a Muslim should not be President of the United States, because Islam is not compatible with the Constitution. In the sort of news outlets I read this is treated as a gross bit of bigotry, but I think I agree with him. Islam has a very strong tradition of theocracy. Many Muslims believe that the only just political power is an explicitly religious one, and that the only true law is Sharia, the law of God as interpreted by the mullahs. Theocracy, even in a soft form, is anathema to me and absolutely incompatible with the American system.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that many Muslims don't take the Islamic legal tradition any more seriously than most American Catholics take their own. But Islam as practiced and taught in places like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran is absolutely incompatible with democracy, and indeed with any sort of secular society. Islam has a vast body of traditional law -- Sharia -- built up by centuries of interpreting the Koran and other early Islamic texts. The Islamic tradition teaches that all law should be developed in this way, by judges interpreting religious texts. The system has only a very limited place for a legislature, because the general view is that law is a divine thing, not a human creation; it is our job to find God's law in the relevant texts, not reason our for ourselves what would be best.

Over the past decade I have seen many surveys of Arab and Iranian opinion, and a majority in every poll wants their society and government to be explicitly Islamic. Right there you have a major conflict with the U.S. Constitution, which forbids the "establishment" of religion. Whatever most Americans say about it, we do not live in a Christian country, and this is very, very important to me. You can see from the recent experiences of Iran, Turkey, and Egypt that working out how to have a state that is both Islamic and democratic is very hard. Judaism has some of the same problems, and even in Israel (a state founded by secular socialists) the government assigns a large official role to the Orthodox rabbinate; among other things they decide who is a Jew. Catholicism used to create similar problems; until the 1980s Ireland assigned the church a very large role in education, health care, and other parts of the state, and on matters like marriage and divorce Ireland let the pope dictate their law. But Islam has the biggest and most fully developed system of traditional law, and the most prestigious, and so in general this is a bigger problem in Islam than for the rest of us. In Iran or Saudi Arabia a judge faced with a thorny problem turns to religious texts for the answer and frames his ruling in terms of the Sharia tradition; in the U.S., we forbid our judges from relying on religious texts. There is a real, fundamental, important divide here, the divide created by the Enlightenment. For religious leaders to dictate the law is abhorrent to me, and that is the Islamic tradition.

I know there are Muslim countries, such as Indonesia, where Sharia has limited influence on the law. But I'm sure a mullah from Saudi Arabia or Iran would be quick to tell the Indonesian government that they are bad Muslims. I also suspect that any American Muslim in a position to run for Congress would be a very liberal one, and he or she would have to swear off any interest in Sharia. So an American who is a Muslim in the same sense that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama is a Christian would probably be ok with me. But an orthodox Muslim would have a very hard time convincing me that his or her beliefs can be made to fit with the Constitution or the American political tradition.

To get back to Ben Carson, he is too much of a fundamentalist Christian for me to want him as my president; I don't think I could ever vote for a doctor who doesn't believe in evolution. But to me this only proves that the question he raised is a perfectly legitimate one. The sort of religion a candidate espouses is absolutely relevant to his or her fitness to be President, and the main tradition of Islam creates particular problems.

Mask Made from Fungus, Nepal

From the Cavin-Morris Gallery

The Latest Triumph of Our Syrian Policy

The Telegraph:

Pentagon-trained rebels in Syria are reported to have betrayed their American backers and handed their weapons over to al-Qaeda in Syria immediately after re-entering the country. Fighters with Division 30, the “moderate” rebel division favoured by the United States, surrendered to the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, a raft of sources claimed on Monday night.

Daniel Larison:

This is entirely unsurprising, and it drives home how irresponsible demands to “arm the rebels” in Syria have always been. Of course these weapons are ending up in the hands of jihadists. Jihadists and their allies make up the forces fighting against the Syrian regime, and any other anti-regime group is going to cooperate with them or be attacked and have their weapons plundered by them. . . . Syria hawks have promoted the fantasy that there are “moderates” that can be turned into an effective U.S. proxy in order to get the U.S. sucked into a conflict in which it had and still has no stake and no allies worth having.

I suppose part of the problem is that Obama agreed to go along with the scheme while obviously believing that it has no chance of success, which is hardly a recipe for victory. But that does not mean that an administration with more "resolve" would do any better; likely a Rubio or Fiorina administration would only send more arms that would just as quickly end up in the hands of our enemies, and perhaps start dropping bombs that would kill lots of Syrians without fixing anything.

What is the Happiest Political System?

Social Democracy:

Looking across countries, the more generous and universal the welfare state, the greater the level of human happiness, net of other factors.

Old Church, Suntak, Sweden

The Old Church (gamla kyrka) in Suntak, Sweden was built in the 12th century.

All at about the same time, apparently, despite the appearance of separate sections. The wooden roof has of course been replaced.

The interior once boasted several medieval relics, but the 12th-century font has been moved to the New Church, built in 1902.

And this medieval bench to the local museum.

The interior decoration dates mainly to the eighteenth century, although some of the faded paintings may be as old as 1400. Love those coats of arms on the wall.

Seems like a fascinating place.

What Happened in Waco?

Unless you live nearby or know lots of bikers, you have probably lost track of the crazy story from Waco. Last spring shooting broke out in the parking lot of a steak house, and nine people were killed. Since then: silence. And not because news organizations have lost interest:

Four months after a shootout left 9 bikers dead at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas, prompting the arrest of 177 people, many of them presumably innocent, authorities are still denying the public access to key pieces of evidence, including video. The legal fate of arrestees still hangs in the balance. And it still isn’t known how many of the dead bikers were killed by bullets that police officers fired.

But police bullets did hit some of the bikers, the Associated Press reports after reviewing 8,800 pages of evidence apparently leaked to the news organization. “The gunfire included rounds fired by police that hit bikers, though it isn't clear whether those rifle shots caused any of the fatalities,” Emily Schmall reports. “Investigators have offered scant details about what sparked the fight or how the gunfire played out, and no one has been charged.” 18 bikers were wounded but survived the melee.

Lawyers in the case have seen “dashboard video of people fleeing the scene while shots ring out, audio of police threatening to shoot people if they rise from the ground and photos of bodies lying in pools of blood in the restaurant parking lot,” AP adds. But neither police nor defense attorneys are talking about the evidence due to a broad gag order that a coalition of media organizations is challenging as unconstitutional. It was imposed by a judge who is a former law partner of the local district attorney.

This is crazy. The longer this goes on, the worse it looks for the Waco police. What are they hiding? Was it an officer who fired first, touching off the slaughter? Was the whole business about a fight between rival gangs a sham? I don't know, but right now it looks like nobody else knows, either, except perhaps for people in the DA's office who aren't saying for reasons that look increasingly bad.

Noah Millman on Hypocrisy

A few weeks ago we had a discussion here about allegations of hypocrisy and the part they play in American public life. I am still very interested in this question, so I thought I would pass along this very interesting post on the same topic by Noah Millman. Millman is responding to a column by Damon Linker, who wrote:

When we denounce someone for hypocrisy, we judge him harshly, but without having to express a substantive commitment of our own with regard to ends. The hypocrite is judged entirely on his own terms, accused of violating the ideal of human flourishing that he himself professes to uphold, revere, and use as a standard for judging others. The hypocrite is guilty, as we say, of having “double standards” — expecting exacting behavior from others while letting himself off the hook more easily. Simply pointing that out seems to allow us to be judgmental while remaining agnostic about whether we actually affirm any vision of human flourishing ourselves.

But that isn’t quite true. When we call someone a hypocrite, we often do so on the basis of two implicit moral assumptions: first, that a person who expresses a moral standard should be expected to live up to it with complete consistency; and second, that if a person fails to live up to it with complete consistency, the moral standard should be abandoned and replaced with one that can be consistently followed.

Linker goes on to make the same point that I regularly make, that since everyone falls short of his or her ideals at some point, the only way to avoid all hypocrisy is to have no ideals at all. Linker calls this "a license to aim low and succeed."

Millman responds,

I understand his point – and I think that, in general, our culture could benefit from vastly less denunciation, shaming and witch-hunting on the part of would-be puritans of all political stripes. But I think his conclusion is considerably over-broad – and mis-states the rationale behind many denunciations of hypocrisy. . . .

Other times, the charge of hypocrisy is pretty clearly tied to a real disagreement about what the morality of ends should be, as opposed to an objection to ends as such. Let’s say you have a married, male, Christian minister, a firm opponent of gay marriage, who is revealed to be having an affair with another man. Clearly, this fellow is going to be zinged for hypocrisy. But those doing the zinging are not neutral on the matter of “ends” – far from it. It’s likely that, in their view, it is a positive good to be honest, privately and publicly, about one’s sexuality, and that repressing it does actual harm, both to oneself and to others. The minister is denounced not so much for failing to live up to his own morality of ends, but because he is a walking proof-text for an alternative morality of ends.

I think Millman is absolutely right in this; sometimes the accusation of hypocrisy is made to attack the moral system of the alleged hypocrite as false, unnatural, or otherwise too flawed to be worth following.

Now let’s change the example – say that the minister is revealed to be having an affair not with a man, but with a woman. He’ll still be zinged for hypocrisy, but the charge would read somewhat differently – because it is unlikely (though not impossible) that those doing the denouncing believe in an alternative morality of ends in which cheating as such is fine. And yet, the force still comes from a real disagreement within a morality of ends, and not a dispute about the legitimacy of a morality of ends. The force comes from an implicit argument that public profession of Christianity is a lousy means to the end of sexual fidelity – and that attacking gay marriage for being a threat to faithful heterosexual marriages is particularly obnoxious because it burdens an uninvolved minority with the sins of the majority.

Again Millman is right. Christian evangelists often claim that without religious morality, the world is doomed to perdition. So accusations of hypocrisy against straying shepherds can be a way to say, no, there is no such relationship between religious belief and moral behavior. This is why some liberals are always pointing out that divorce is more common in the Bible Belt.

The charge of hypocrisy, in other words, is usually embedded within a larger framework of argument, one which may affirm or reject the specific morality of ends that the accused hypocrite claims to uphold. Rather than deny the legitimacy of the charge of hypocrisy, wouldn’t bringing that context out into the open advance the cause of honest argument more effectively?

I agree. But I still dislike making these arguments in terms of hypocrisy. Gay marriage is not a good thing because some Christian ministers have gay affairs; nor is the existence of perfectly non-hypocritical Catholics any sort of argument against gay rights. I find the accusation of hypocrisy to be an irritating distraction. But I conceded that, as Millman says, there can be a lot of substance behind such accusations.

The Beast in the Tree

Franz Xaver Winterhalter: the Master of Women in Dresses

Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-1873) was the most stylish and sought-after court painter in an era of when royal women wore truly sumptuous clothes. Thus his many female portraits are as much of dresses and jewels as they are of women, and when you see one of his paintings online the face has often been cropped out, leaving only the dress. Today the Getty had the painting above on their Tumblr, but they did not reproduce the whole thing. (Leonilla, Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, 1843).

Instead they show these details, emphasizing Winterhalter's magnificent treatment of fabric. An interesting fate for a man who once burned to be one of the leading artists of his age.

Winterhalter was born in the Black Forest to a family of well-off peasants, the sixth of eight children, four of whom died in infancy. Strange background for a court painter. He attended a monastic school, where some art-loving monk must have noticed and encouraged his talent. He left school at 13 and entered the first of a series of apprenticeships with artists and printmakers in southern Germany. Until he was 28 he supported himself mainly as a lithographer. (Study of a Girl in Profile.)

Winterhalter had his first close association with royalty in 1828, when he became drawing master to Sophie Margravine of Baden (above, a portrait of 1830).

From then on Winterhalter's reputation spread among European royals, especially after he moved to Paris in 1836. He painted Queen Victoria for the first time in 1842; he eventually did 120 paintings for her, mostly portraits of her and her family. This number gives you some idea of the number of portraits he painted, since Victoria was not even his top client.

Famous image of Victoria in 1843, which used to be the banner at the web site of Britain's National Portrait Gallery.

Winterhalter's most generous patrons were Emperor Napoleon II and Empress Eugénie of France, shown above in a portrait of 1861.

Once he had the patronage of France's rulers, the orders flooded in. Winterhalter was not entirely happy about this. He did not mind painting portraits, which was how most painters of his era paid the bills. But his real ambition was to do the sort of academic scenes (historical, mythological) that got top placement in the salons and earned their creators critical acclaim. What was he to do, though? It was devilish difficult to refuse requests from all these sovereigns and mighty duchesses, some of whom demanded to be painted again and again. (Countess Katarzyna Potocka, 1854)

He said yes and endured the trials of being a wealthy celebrity artist, getting ever richer while his critical reputation steadily sank. "Not serious," said the masters of the art world. "Oh duchess, you look magnificent!" said Winterhalter, as some chamberlain filled his pockets with gold. (Madame Barbe de Rimsky-Korsakov, 1857)

Clothes. Oh, the clothes.

Mourning was no bar to wearing fabulous clothes, as long as they were black. (Princess Kotschoubey, 1860)

For variety, here is a fascinating painting of Queen Victoria and her family: The First of May, 1851. This painting celebrated the first birthday of Prince Arthur, the 82nd birthday of his godfather the Duke of Wellington, and the opening of the Crystal Palace Exhibition (in the background). The arrangement is modeled on paintings of the Three Magi presenting their gifts to Jesus; poor Prince Albert looks about as involved as Joseph usually does.

Princess Elizaveta Esperovna Troubetzkaya, 1859. As with many other Victorians, Winterhalter's reputation sank when the Impressionists took the art world by storm and by 1900 his paintings were disappearing from museum walls. Now they are back.

An unknown lady, painted around 1860.

And finally the work that some consider Winterhalter's masterpiece, Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her Ladies in Waiting, 1855. Nine dresses in one painting! But what dresses they are, and what women.

Redistricting, Race and Class in Brooklyn

P.S. 8 in Brooklyn Heights is badly overcrowded:

To the city, the solution for the overcrowding at P.S. 8 seemed obvious: move those two neighborhoods from P.S. 8’s zone and into that of P.S. 307, which is nearby and has room to spare. The proposal, however, has drawn intense opposition, and not only from the families who would be rezoned from the predominantly white P.S. 8 to the mostly black P.S. 307. Some residents of the housing project served by P.S. 307 also oppose the rezoning, worried about how an influx of wealthy, mostly white families could change their school.

The opposition of P.S. 307 families has a lot to do with the fear of gentrification, which has changed one Brooklyn neighborhood after another. But it underlines the suspicion between the races that is always just under the surface in American -- except when it is boiling over:

For all its diversity, New York City, by some measures, has one of the most segregated school systems in the country, in part because many elementary schools are effectively closed off to children who live outside their zones. And although the Brooklyn rezoning is mainly a response to crowding, it is becoming a real-life study in the challenges of integrating just one of the city’s schools.

If it ain't broke. . .

Sumerian dice from the royal tombs of Ur, 2600 to 2400 BCE

Samnite Tomb in Pompeii

French archaeologists digging in Pompeii stumbled on a rare remnant of the pre-Roman town, a tomb dating to the fourth century BCE. At that time Pompeii was part of the Samnite realm. The tomb held one adult woman, and some nice grave goods. One interesting detail is that the town's Roman inhabitants seem to have known of the site and avoided disturbing it, so perhaps this woman was a minor hero of some kind.