Cross-cultural “Stuff”
And speaking of camels….
A few weeks ago, or perhaps a few months ago, or at least recently enough that it has stayed in my head, one of the Marginalia asked me about camels. The short answer is simple: read Richard W. Bulliet’s The Camel and the Wheel. It’s a charming and well-illustrated book that explores the question of…
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Re-Inventing the Wheel
If English is your primary language, you know that “reinventing the wheel” is a standard phrase for, well, spinning your wheels–recreating something that already exists, usually at the expense of unnecessary time and effort.* The phrase rests on several assumptions: That the wheel is one of the foundational discoveries on which civilization was built. That…
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The World’s First Aviator?
‘Abbas Ibn Firnas is not well known in the west but he’s a hero to little boys and aviation buffs throughout the Arab-speaking world. The Andalusian scientist was court poet and astronomer to Abd al-Rahman III in the days when Cordoba was the wealthiest and most civilized city in Europe. Like many Muslim scientists of…
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