Ten tons of animal bones. 99.9 per cent of which were equine

Certainly by the fourth millenium BCE: remains found in a northern Kazakh burial site from that period contained ten tons of animal bones. 99.9 per cent of which were equine. Many of the jaws and teeth show the sort of wear you would see on a horse fitted with a bit, which suggests that steppe people were riding horses about 5,000 years ago at a time when the first pharoah was unifying the upper and lower lands of Egypt, when Gilgamesh built the incomparable walls of Uruk, Aborigines were engraving rocks around what is now Sydney, settlements began to appear in Central America and the Cycladic civilisation emerged in Greece.  

A. Sattin, Nomads (2022), 48-9

Once upon a time we were all hunters and gatherers

Once upon a time we were all hunters and gatherers. The first to stop hunting and gathering did so no more than 12,000 years ago, which is but a dot on the human timeline. This was when food was abundant and there were few of us to eat it. The Bible's Old Testament and the Quran's Sura 2, al-Baqarah, the Cow, present this as time spent in a garden, a time of great happiness and perfect innocent in the Garden of Eden.

There are many translations of the word Eden, but all of them point in the same direction, from the Sumerian edin, meaning a plain or steppe, to the Aramaic word for well-watered and the Hebrew for pleasure.

A. Sattin, Nomads (2022), 15

The youngest sibling of a whole family of writing tools that arrived in a flurry in the few decades either side of the beginning of the thirteenth century

The index, after all, did not arrive alone, but is rather the youngest sibling of a whole family of writing tools that arrived in a flurry in the few decades either side of the beginning of the thirteenth century. And all have one thing in common: they are all designed to streamline the reading process, to bring a new efficiency to the way we use books.

D. Duncan, Index, a history of the (2021), 56

Had her loyalty rested on no securer foundation than diffidence - on sheer, silly incompetence?

For a moment Meg was shocked. Isabel had, indeed, played the part of a loyal wife in all this; but had her loyalty rested on no securer foundation than diffidence - on sheer, silly incompetence?

But it was wrong to be shocked. Who has ever been able to analyse the motives, good and bad, heroic and ludicrous, which add up to such qualities as loyalty and courage? Isn't it enough that they do add up?

C. Fremlin, Uncle Paul (1959), 211

He had created a world that was complete, self-sufficient and almost faultless

The man and his work were one. Evelyn Waugh later described Wodehouse’s work as timeless, but it is also immutable. The comparative lack of development in his writing is one of its unique features: no other twentieth-century English writer of consequence evolved in his mature work as little as Wodehouse. He had created a world that was complete, self-sufficient and almost faultless.

R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004), 371

The moral test with which Wodehouse was confronted in June 1941 was one that was beyond him

The moral test with which Wodehouse was confronted in June 1941 was one that was beyond him. In addition to his upbringing, there was his temperamental preference for finding the easiest way out of a tricky situation – and his obsessive commitment to his writing. It is these two factors that colour his actions with the taint of irresponsibility. Combined with his failure to understand the nature of Nazism, they proved fatal to his reputation.

R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004), 305

Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots

Wodehouse was not alone in flirting with the studios. The talkies had triggered a new gold rush, anticipated by Herman Mankiewicz when in 1925, after a visit to the West Coast, he had cabled his friend Ben Hecht, saying: ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.’ Post-war Hollywood was challenging New York, where the first big studios had been based. The movie-makers’ desperate need for Broadway talent, people who could supply dialogue and scenarios, inspired a westward stampede of playwrights and short story writers. The exodus from the East was, Wodehouse wrote later, ‘like one of those great race movements of the middle ages’.

R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004), 184