John Charles Dollman

John Charles Dollman (1851-1934) was a British painter and illustrator. I discovered him through his illustrations of the Norse myths; this is Wolves Chasing the Sun and Moon.

Frigg Spinning.

The Ride of the Valkyries

Famine, 1904

I also found this painting interesting: The Unknown, 1912. By that time, it seems, consciousness of evolution had penetrated the British psyche to the point that a painter interested in myths was thinking in terms of myths about apes and fire.

This is by far Dollman's most famous work: A Very Gallant Gentleman, 1913. The scene is from Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic expedition. Scott wrote in his diary:

At lunch, the day before yesterday, poor Titus Oates said he couldn't go on; he proposed we should leave him in his sleeping-bag.

Should this be found I want these facts recorded. Oates' last thoughts were of his Mother, but immediately before he took pride in thinking that his regiment would be pleased with the bold way in which he met his death. We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to discuss outside subjects. He did not - would not - give up hope till the very end. He was a brave soul. This was the end. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning - yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, 'I am just going outside and may be some time.' He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.

Oates' sacrifice did not help his companions; they were trapped by the blizzard and were all dead within a few days. But Scott's diary was found by a later expedition, and Oates' story became very famous.

Claude Francis Barry, "A War-Time Nocturne"

Tower Bridge, London, 1940

Korea News

North Korea Requests Commercial Routes to Seoul
The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) announced earlier today that the Government of North Korea has sent a request to launch routes between Pyongyang and Seoul, the capital cities of North and South Korea, respectively.

This surprising move has come following several peace summit meetings between the North and the South in the last few weeks.

North Korea’s only carrier, Air Koryo, would be the airline to operate the routes between both cities. The carrier already serves three international destinations, including Beijing, Shenyang, and Vladivostok.

Old Meets New

The news from China:

The Chinese Academy of Sciences has apologized for a Taoist ceremony organized by construction workers that included the slaughter of a lamb to inaugurate the construction of a nuclear test reactor. Images showing a monk chanting while the lamb was killed sparked online controversy in China. The April ceremony marked the start of construction of a thorium molten salt reactor in north-central China, part of a 22-billion yuan (US$3.5-billion) project to be operated by the academy’s Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics. In a statement posted on its homepage on 30 April, the academy said it apologized because the ritual was “against the spirit of science” and that institute staff did not know the ritual was planned.

Cyberbullying Yourself

NPR:

According to a survey published late last year in the Journal of Adolescent Health, teens are bullying themselves online as a way to manage feelings of sadness and self-hatred and to gain attention from their friends. For the study, 5,593 middle and high school students from across the U.S., ages 12 to 17, completed a series of questionnaires that asked about their experiences with digital self-harm and cyberbullying.

"We were alarmed to learn that 6 percent of the youth who participated in our study engaged in some form of digital self-harm," says Sameer Hinduja, co-author of the study and a professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic University. 

An example:

Child psychologist Sheryl Gonzalez-Ziegler of Denver says it's a growing problem among teens whom she counsels. One recent client, an adolescent girl, told Gonzalez-Ziegler that she anonymously cyberbullied herself because, as a gay teen, she felt vulnerable and exposed.

"She set up ghost accounts on Instagram and posted mean comments about herself, saying things like, 'I think you're creepy and gay' and 'Don't sit next to me again,' " Ziegler says.

"She said these things because she feared being mocked by her peers," the psychologist explains. "She thought their teasing wouldn't be so bad if she beat them to the punch."

I don't find this surprising at all. I remember learning back in high school psychology about the two types of hero fantasies, the conquering hero and the suffering hero. And while it's still hard to make yourself a conqueror, it is easy to become a suffering hero by conjuring up a crew of online bullies.

For an example of someone who made herself very popular (for a while) this way, see here.

Folk Art from the Winterthur Museum

The Winterthur Museum in Delaware's Brandywine Valley has an amazing collection of Fraktur, that is, drawings on paper by Pennsylvania Germans. I found this one on pinterest with no source and eventually traced it back to Winterthur, which started me on this project. It is by Bernhard Misson, a fraktur artist and schoolmaster who taught in Bucks County. It dates to 1800-1825.

A work by the "Rockhill Artist," 1830-1850.

A baptismal certificate from 1798. Here you can really see that this tradition draws on medieval art, especially in the faces of the lions and the birds at the bottom. I suppose the influence came from church painting rather than manuscripts.

Anonymous, 1820-1840. I don't love the human figures in this naive style, and of course a lot of it is Christian and very didactic. But I love the color, the animals, and the abstract forms.

This is not fraktur but a fabric drawing, made with swatches of cloth, but obviously in the same tradition.

Not a tame unicorn. 1795-1830. Notice what the artist has done with the heraldic family tree.

Anonymous, 1800-1820. Many, many more in the museum's online collection.

Steppes Genetics

Ancient DNA data is pouring in faster than anyone can keep track of. The latest results focus on central Asia:

For thousands of years the Eurasian steppes have been a centre of human migrations and cultural change. Here we sequence the genomes of 137 ancient humans (about 1× average coverage), covering a period of 4,000 years, to understand the population history of the Eurasian steppes after the Bronze Age migrations. We find that the genetics of the Scythian groups that dominated the Eurasian steppes throughout the Iron Age were highly structured, with diverse origins comprising Late Bronze Age herders, European farmers and southern Siberian hunter-gatherers. Later, Scythians admixed with the eastern steppe nomads who formed the Xiongnu confederations, and moved westward in about the second or third century BC, forming the Hun traditions in the fourth–fifth century AD, and carrying with them plague that was basal to the Justinian plague. These nomads were further admixed with East Asian groups during several short-term khanates in the Medieval period. These historical events transformed the Eurasian steppes from being inhabited by Indo-European speakers of largely West Eurasian ancestry to the mostly Turkic-speaking groups of the present day, who are primarily of East Asian ancestry.

That's just the abstract; I'll report if there is more information in the article, once I find a copy.

Counting the First American Indians

A new genetic study finds that the original Native Americans numbered between 229 and 300, with an average estimate of around 250.

Note that that is an "effective population," which means the number who contributed to the eventual gene pool. Because some of the founders must have died without leaving descendants, or lost all their children, the actual population must have been larger than that. Statisticians argue about the right figure, but nobody thinks it should be more than double the actual population. So if this calculation is right, the vast majority of American Indians in 1492 descended from between 229 and 500 first settlers.

That's actually a pretty big band; I would have thought no more than 150 or so could hang together through the crossing. But 229 to 500 is what the genetic math is saying now.

Education and Partisanship

Interesting graphic from Thomas Edsall in the Times:

More education = more polarization. What is one to make of that?

In Defense of Cultural Appropriation

David Frum:

Meet the Death Metal Cowboys of Botswana. In black leather decorated with metal studs, they play a pounding style of music that people who know more than me trace to the British band “Venom” and its 1981 album Welcome to Hell. Question: Is this cultural appropriation? Why or why not?

The question is inspired by a spasm of social-media cruelty that caught wide attention last week. A young woman in Utah bought a Chinese-style dress to wear to her high school formal. She posted some photographs of herself on her personal Instagram page—and suddenly found herself the target of virulent online abuse.

For once, the story has a happy ending. Good sense and kindness prevailed, and instead of her prom being ruined, the young woman exited the dance buoyed by worldwide support and affirmation, most of all from within China.

Because, really, that dress she was wearing was only sort-of Chinese. The style was created after the 1911 overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and its irritating laws regulating dress and hair:

When the Manchu dynasty was finally overthrown in 1911, Chinese people found themselves free for the first time in 250 years to dress as they pleased. In the decade afterward, creative personalities in the great commercial metropolis of Shanghai devised a new kind of garment for women. They called it the cheongsam.

The new garment was a fusion of old and new, east and west. Manchurian-style fabrics were tailored to a European-style pattern. In the past, upper-class women’s clothing had conveyed status and restricted movement. The cheongsam was equally available to women from a wide range of statuses—and enabled Chinese women to move as their western counterparts did.

Every cultural meme you can think of has a similar history; trace it back far enough and you will find that it was born from borrowing, mixing, and historical accident.

You cannot own a culture.

Who Voted for Trump, Continued

Matt Grossman and Daniel Thaler:

Donald Trump won the American presidency in 2016 by overperforming expectations in upper Midwest states, surprising even Republican political elites. We argue that attitudes toward social change were an underappreciated dividing line between supporters of Trump and Hillary Clinton as well as between Republicans at the mass and elite levels. We introduce a concept and measure of aversion to (or acceptance of) social diversification and value change, assess the prevalence of these attitudes in the mass public and among political elites, and demonstrate its effects on support for Trump. Our research uses paired surveys of Michigan’s adult population and community of political elites in the Fall of 2016. Aversion to social change is strongly predictive of support for Trump at the mass level, even among racial minorities. But attitudes are far more accepting of social change among elites than the public and aversion to social change is not a factor explaining elite Trump support. If elites were as averse to social change as the electorate—and if that attitude mattered to their vote choice—they might have been as supportive of Trump. Views of social change were not as strongly related to congressional voting choices.

As to what "aversion to social change" means:

Aversion to social change is related to but distinguishable from racial resentment (which invokes specific attitudes toward African American advancement), authoritarianism (measured as parenting attitudes), and ethnocentrism (including attitudes toward Latinos and Muslims). It constitutes views of the perceived high-pace movement from traditional values to more diverse ideas and groups. We find that aversion to social change predicts Trump support independently of any of these factors (as well as independently of party identification, ideology, religiosity, and economic attitudes).

This makes sense to me; whatever else Trump is, he is obviously old school.

But as they note, this factor only explains part of the small change from 2012 to 2016; after all 90% of both Democrats and Republicans voted for their own candidate.

Iconoclasm?

Long article by Bari Weiss in the Times give me the chance to ruminate on the "contrarian" thinkers of our time. Weiss is writing about people associated with Quillette and the "Intellectual Dark Web," who think they are taking great risks by saying forbidden things. And some of them have suffered for taking unpopular stands, for example:

A year ago, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were respected tenured professors at Evergreen State College, where their Occupy Wall Street-sympathetic politics were well in tune with the school’s progressive ethos. Today they have left their jobs, lost many of their friends and endangered their reputations.

All this because they opposed a “Day of Absence,” in which white students were asked to leave campus for the day. For questioning a day of racial segregation cloaked in progressivism, the pair was smeared as racist. Following threats, they left town for a time with their children and ultimately resigned their jobs.

“Nobody else reacted. That’s what shocked me,” Mr. Weinstein said. “It told me that a culture that told itself it was radically open-minded was actually a culture cowed by fear.”

On the other hand people like Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson are professional contrarians, who have made selective opposition to popular (mostly liberal) opinions the route to fame and fortune. Peterson is said to make $80,000 a month just off his Patreon, and he recently said that he had "found a way to monetize social justice warriors."

Joe Rogan says his friends are able to make a big splash because "people are starved for controversial opinions." And obviously there is something to that; a big part of Donald Trump's appeal is that his fans think he says things no other politician will.

I feel somewhat bemused by all of this. First, it seems to me that if there is anything our world has plenty of, it's people expressing controversial opinions on the internet. There is a liberal mainstream of sorts (pro-gay rights, pro-abortion, pro-giving money to the poor), but its hold on power is tenuous and there are many, many voices in opposition all the time.

Second is the weird notion that "social justice" or "political correctness" is something new; every society has things you are not supposed to say, and some have been much harsher about enforcing their norms than ours is. There have also always been social or political positions that require you to be very careful about what you say on certain topics, viz., the mayor of New York has to be very respectful of Jews and Italians, and the owners and executives of NBA teams cannot ever say anything that in any way remotely smacks of racism.

This is just life as a social mammal.

Third, I find all of this distantly interesting because I have such a generally skeptical take on life. People seem to shout the loudest about topics nobody knows anything about. Setting aside Cosby and Lauer and their ilk, does anybody have a good theory of how men and women are supposed to interact at work? Does anybody know if giving sex hormones to 11-year-olds will work out well in the long run? Does anybody know how to end the epidemic of opioid deaths? What sort of education to offer poor children not much interested in school? Or how to create an economy that is both dynamic and fair?

Another weird thing about this discourse is that it focuses mostly on hot-button social issues: gay rights, trans rights, sexual harassment, religion. Where are the contrarians in economic thought? In political science? Actually of course there are many such people all over the internet, arguing for socialism or anarchism or proportional voting. Yet they are not part of this alleged "contrarian" movement, which mostly accepts in a bland way the legitimacy of our political and economic institutions. Part of Jordan Peterson's schtick is the full-throated defense of western civilization as it currently exists, and it seems a little weird to me that this could be considered a contrarian opinion. On certain campuses, yes, but does that really matter in the big picture?

One thing I do like about this little movement is a determination to continue the discussion on a rational basis. Most of what passes for debate in our world has nothing to do with weighing different possibilities; mostly we try to shame and exclude people by treating them or their ideas as so far beyond the pale as to be not even worth engaging. Sometimes that works. But sometimes it just makes people mad, and I think President Donald J. Trump is the most obvious result of trying to treat 40 percent of the country as pariahs. So I like it that people like Rogan and Harris will argue with anybody, any time. But I dislike their insistence that they are bold, risk-taking contrarians. If you ask me, any idea you can make a living expressing can't really be all that dangerous.

The New Populism

Now that we all mistrust institutions and experts, we can rely instead on stock tips like this, which appeared on Yahoo today:

How many people do you suppose responded to this ad?

Free Speech and Speaking Freely

Stanley Fish says the root of our problem with "fake news" is too much transparency, and that privacy and control of information flow are essential to real deliberation, and real freedom:

Another way to put this is to say that information, data and the unbounded flow of more and more speech can be politicized — it can, that is, be woven into a narrative that constricts rather than expands the area of free, rational choice. When that happens — and it will happen often — transparency and the unbounded flow of speech become instruments in the production of the very inequalities (economic, political, educational) that the gospel of openness promises to remove. And the more this gospel is preached and believed, the more that the answer to everything is assumed to be data uncorrupted by interests and motives, the easier it will be for interest and motives to operate under transparency’s cover.

This is so because speech and data presented as if they were independent of any mechanism of selectivity will float free of the standards of judgment that are always the content of such mechanisms. Removing or denying the existence of gatekeeping procedures will result not in a fair and open field of transparency but in a field where manipulation and deception find no obstacles.

I am beginning to think that this is true; that unlimited speech mainly empowers those who appeal to our lowest instincts. What we can do about that in the internet age, I have no idea.

Yayoi Kusama

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama calls this new installation Flower Obsession.

She is best known for her mirror rooms; this Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, 2009.

Spring in the Woods

This shade of green that explodes in filtered light, creating a glow I can never capture; it transports me. This to me is the essence of spring.

And a bonus, an invasive wisteria and a native dogwood, providing some variety in the color scheme.

Politics Since the End of the Cold War

Jedediah Purdy notes that the recent wave of books about the "crisis of democracy" all focus on the defense of "norms":

One problem with identifying the protection of political norms with the defense of democracy is that such norms are intrinsically conservative (in a small-c sense) because they achieve stability by maintaining unspoken habits—which institutions you defer to, which policies you do not question, and so on. . . .

Even when norms do not lean to the right—for instance, the norm of honoring previous Supreme Court decisions is part of the reason the right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade has not been overturned—they are a depoliticized way of talking about political conflict. Norms are like the statues of dead leaders: you can’t know whether you are for or against them without knowing which values they support. The very idea that it would be possible to analyze political developments in terms of the decline of stabilizing, trans-partisan norms rather than substantive ideology is a political position. The underlying assumption of those who defend norms is that, at some very deep level, Americans have always agreed on the key issues, above all liberty and equality, and have just had to work out the kinks through the generations. That kind of thinking is a residue of the Cold War, when the quest for ideological legitimacy in the battle against communism led both parties to suppress their radical wings and converge on a common language of American principles and constitutional destiny.

The structural buttresses of that world have been crumbling since 1989, but it took a long time to fall. The year 2016 brought the first genuinely post–Cold War election: the perennial carnage of American capitalism, intensified by forty years of growing inequality, prepared the ground for Bernie Sanders’s socialism, while the nativism and racism that had slunk just outside respectable politics returned full-throated. What unifies the crisis-of-democracy genre is the failure to understand this, that the present moment is not an anomalous departure but rather a return to the baseline—to the historical norm, one might say.

Is this right? I mean, what about the 1960s? We have our problems now but the assassination of major public figures hasn't been one of them. But maybe the shadow of the Cold War did impress on the political system that the president had to be a "man of stature," someone who could sit at those all important summits without embarrassing us.

I do agree that extreme partisanship is not at all unusual in history; we had it in the 1850s and the 1930s. But perhaps those comparisons are not encouraging.

I end up back where I often do, thinking that the really important divide in America is between those who want some kind of radical shake-up and those who don't. I don't, so I would like polite discourse and compromise. But if I did I would probably say to hell with manners, let's start smashing things.

Louis John Rhead

Louis John Rhead (1857 – 1926) was born in England but he emigrated to America at the age of 24 and spent most of his career there. (Jane, 1897)

His family had worked for generations in the Staffordshire pottery works, where his father was a gilder and painter and then an instructor of gilders and painters.

Rhead studied at the National Art Training School in London, where he showed such talent that at the age of 13 his father sent him to Paris to apprentice with with Gustave-Rodolphe-Clarence Boulanger. He came to America in 1883 to become the art director for the publishing firm of D. Appleton in New York City. He then married an American woman and became a US citizen.

Rhead first achieved artistic success designing posters. You may have noticed that there is a lot of famous poster art from the late 1800s, mainly in the style we call Art Nouveau – Alphonse Mucha, Eugène Grasset, and so on. Rhead was part of this movement. I imagine the enthusiasm for posters had something to do with technological advances in affordable color printing, which caused advertisers to pour in a lot of money and made it more fun and exciting for artists to do the work.

In 1897 Rhead staged an exhibit in Paris of his posters which got a lot of positive press, which tells you how big the art form was at the time.

Of course your poster exhibition had to have a poster, and this is the one Rhead did for his own exhibition.

After around 1900 Rhead shifted his focus and began to illustrate books. Which made him part of another big artistic movement, the "Golden Age" of book illustration. This is from Gulliver's Travels.

The Tempest.

But the greatest love of Rhead's mature life was fly-fishing. This made him part of yet another big movement, this time a social one, when all the elite men went up to Scotland or the Adirondacks to tie flies, wade in freezing rivers, and talk about the beauty of nature and how The Compleat Angler was the greatest book ever written. That's Rhead's book plate above. He wrote several books on fly-fishing, including the thriller American Trout-Stream Insects (1916).

Naturally he illustrated his own books. Rhead's obituary in the Times read:

LOUIS RHEAD, ARTIST AND ANGLER, DEAD. Exhausted Recently by Long Struggle In Capturing a thirty-pound Turtle.

About two weeks ago Mr. Rhead set out to catch a turtle weighing thirty pounds which had been devastating trout ponds on his place, Seven Oaks. After the turtle was hooked, it put up a fight for more than half an hour. Although Mr. Rhead was successful in the end, he became exhausted. A short time later he suffered from his first attack of heart disease. Yesterday’s was his second.

Fantastic Cities

The Ideal City by an unknown Renaissance artist, probably Francesco di Giorgio Martini.

St. Anthony before a City by Albrecht Durer.

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Consummation, 1835-1836

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction, 1835-1836

Erastus Salisbury Field, Historical Monument of the American Republic, 1867–1888

Metropolis, 1927.

Hugh Ferriss, "The Science Center" from The Metropolis of Tomorrow, 1929. More here.

Géza Maróti, Study for Atlantis, 1933.

From the original Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, 1982.

Harkonnen Palace on Giedi Prime, from Dune, the David Lynch film of 1984.

Bartertown from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, 1985.

Dinotopia by James Gurney, 1992

Gérard Trignac, illustration for an edition of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities produced in 1993.

Diagon Alley from Harry Potter and the Sorcer's Stone, 2001

Minas Tirith, as imagined by Alan Lee

and as it appeared in Peter Jackson's film, 2001.

Coruscant, from Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Shaun Tan, The Arrival, 2006.

Other suggestions? I have the feeling I'm missing something famous.

Job Loss and Right-Wing Nationalism

In good times, people can be generous, even toward outsiders.

In bad times people tend to draw back into their own communities, focus support on their own kind and become hostile toward outsiders.

People who feel that things are going badly for them can still be very generous to people like them, for example, the farmers who recently shipped hundreds of tons of alfalfa to other farmers whose pastures had been devastated by wildfires. But they are anything but generous to outsiders. If there's a plague, kill the Jews, or if there aren't any Jews around, pick some marginal old woman, declare her a witch and burn her.

Thomas Edsall has a round-up of all the social science linking the loss of manufacturing jobs to right-wing nationalism, and while no single piece of this research is convincing in itself, the overall picture is pretty grim. On industrial robots in Europe:

robot shock increases support for nationalist and radical right parties. . . . both technology and trade seem to drive structural changes which are consequential for voting behavior.

and in the US:

some of the places where Trump made the biggest gains relative to McCain or Romney are in the heartland of heavy manufacturing where robots did lead to losses of manufacturing jobs.

And likewise in places where jobs were lost to foreign trade, anger is turned not against the politicians who gave us free trade, but toward convenient outsiders:

Rather than directly opposing free trade policies, individuals in import-exposed communities tend to target scapegoats such as immigrants and minorities. This drives support for right-wing candidates, as they compete electorally by targeting out-groups.

Edsall summarizes:

In other words, job losses and plant closings are a political gold mine for the Republican Party, crucial to their victories in House and presidential races and almost certainly in Senate, gubernatorial and state legislative races as well.

The whole argument about whether economic turmoil or racism is behind support for Trump is moot, because insecurity and racism are strongly linked. Obviously there are racists who will always vote their prejudices no matter what else is happening, but what carried Trump into the White House was a wave of insecurity and resentment among white working people. Trump showed that by deflecting that anxiety away from Republican policies and toward outsiders and unspecified "elites," a white majority can be created for winning elections.

If you ask me, the left in America now is much too focused on racism itself, as if it existed in a vacuum, and not enough on creating a more secure and comfortable world for working people.

Smuggling in Ancient Assyria

The amazing library of clay tablets from the Assyrian merchant colony at Kanesh in Turkey continues to yield new wonders. About 23,000 tablets have been recovered, dating to about 1950 to 1800 BCE. These were ordinary business documents:

The introduction formula is kept to a minimum, ‘from so-and-so to so-and-so say this’, then comes the message in the first person. The message typically contains instructions from one merchant to his trading partner about the forthcoming shipment: the types and quantities of goods, their unit price and the applicable exchange rates, practical arrangements for the caravan and its staff in terms of accommodation and subsistence, even including the fodder for the donkeys.

Researchers at the British Museum have focused in on one group that describes a different side of trade:

Let them [the transporters] bring the tin via the narrow track if it is clear. If not, let them make small packets of my tin and introduce them gradually into Kanesh, concealed in their underwear.

The phrase "narrow track" appears regularly, and from the context it becomes clear that it describes, not some particular road, but the enterprise of smuggling:

Thanks to the letters they wrote, we know of some of the taxes Old Assyrian merchants were supposed to pay: transport and import taxes upon arrival in Kanesh, tolls and duties on goods and persons en route and an export tax upon departure from Ashur.

Where there is a will there is a way, and for smugglers this was the ‘narrow track’. Going through the mountainous paths of Anatolia, merchants got around some of the taxes by taking a detour away from authorised routes and checkpoints. Lacking the protection offered on official routes, the journey was more perilous, exposed to wild beasts, highway thieves and a harsh climate.

Smuggling also meant fooling the customs system either by not declaring taxable goods or by making a partial declaration. Along with the underwear trick elaborated by Buzazu, the merchants’ letters describe various ruses, whether that meant paying off the guards or hiring mules among the locals who would have known the place inside out.

Fascinating, the things that have endured for 4,000 years.

The Lost City of Irisagrig

The ancient Sumerian city of Irisagrig is known from mentions in documents excavated from other cities, but archaeologists don't know where it is. Somebody does, though:

Hundreds of 4,000 year old tablets that were looted in Iraq and bought by the U.S. company Hobby Lobby seem to hail from a mysterious Sumerian city whose whereabouts are unknown, a U.S. law enforcement agency just announced.

The tablets are part of a cache of thousands of looted artifacts purchased by Hobby Lobby and seized by the U.S. government. They are now set to be returned to Iraq.

Of the 450 cuneiform tablets in that haul, many came from an ancient city called Irisagrig, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcements said in a statement. Many of these tablets date from between 2100 B.C. and 1600 B.C., the statement said. Most of them are legal or administrative texts– meaning that they contain records such as contracts and inventories of goods that made it easier for private citizens and the city’s government to run their affairs – while a few contain a form of magical spells called incantations, the statement said.

I love stories like this, and I can't wait for some intrepid investigator to trace the artifacts back to their source. That's how Arthur Evans found Knossos, among many other such discoveries.