That's A Summary

[shipperx]

So my answer to the Wednesday Reading Meme was to mention that I was reading (yet another) book on ancient history. Finally finished it, and I did rather like his final summary (from audible so all grammar mistakes are my own):

If you encounter someone who doesn't believe that he or she is directly influenced by the ancient world, ask them to consider the following description of a typical daily routine:

At 8am I bought a newspaper and a cup of hot chocolate and got a dollar bill in change. {...}

Another way of describing those same activities might be to say that, according to a Mesopotamian-derived time-keeping system, I bought a Chinese-inspired product and an ancient Meso-American drink, employing a Greek-invented system of currency and, using an Indo-Arabic counting system, I got back change consisting of a bill which was marked with no fewer than three Latin slogans and bore an image of an Egyptian pyramid.

Of course, the very words, letters, and numbers I used to convey that sentence are themselves a mixture of Sumarian, Phoenician, Greek, Latin, and Arabic.

Comments

[angearia.livejournal.com]

Ha! That's great. And yeah, that's really a huge part of why I'm fascinated by history. When you see the signs of it in your everyday life, you want to understand what they mean, where they came from. So much of our contemporary culture seems to lose the context of its origins.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

When you see the signs of it in your everyday life, you want to understand what they mean, where they came from. So much of our contemporary culture seems to lose the context of its origins.


And that's the really neat and interesting part! :D