Fin

Done with Mommsen. I read the last ten pages after our meeting because I felt that after such time and effort I couldn't get to the end and not complete the book. It would be like getting a block from the finish line in a marathon and not finishing when you were still capable of running. Lame.

Lots of food for thought in Mommsen. It makes you think about the root of our culture and where our values, and problems, come from. Our trajectory is so similar and yet I still have hope for our future, as a country and as a global community. We can do better.

Extensions and Weird Egyptians

Thank goodness we decided to give ourselves an extension on the deadline. I now have a chance of finishing the book. It's still going to be close though, I think I have about a hundred and fifty pages left to read and three days to read them. Doable but not easy.

So the Egyptians...yup...they were weird. It seems that Cleopatra was married to her brother. Gross! I read about this sibling sex phenomenon in the news recently because they have just done some genetic research on King Tut and found that he was a little disabled and that this particular kind of problem generally happened only when there wasn't enough genetic diversity. They said he was married to his sister or his mother was his sister or something like that. I thought it was news that the ancient Egyptians accepted that as normal, but apparently I was wrong. Mommsen knew about it, and put it in his book. They don't teach you that in high school world history. Incest! Yikes.