History & Ideas

The books of the Old Testament in approximate order of composition

What if the ancient accounts of creation, divine councils and the gods who governed mankind preserve more than myth? This article compares Psalm 82, Genesis, the Enūma Eliš, the Sumerian King List and the later shaping of the Old Testament to ask whether humanity’s origins—and its troubled relationship with its creators—may have been remembered in distorted form.

Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters

The exhibition became more than an encounter with Aboriginal art. It prompted a reflection on land, possession, mortality and the brief intensity of human existence beneath forces we neither own nor command. Sol Invictus—the unconquered sun—became the image of that vast order: indifferent to fences, empires and claims of permanence, yet illuminating the fleeting instant in which life acquires meaning.

Rousseau, Chateaubriand and the Divided Self

For the French Romantics, the American Indian represented more than an exotic other. He became a symbolic figure through whom Europe reflected on its own condition: freedom and estrangement, nature and civilisation, innocence and loss. In writers such as Rousseau and Chateaubriand, Indigenous America appeared as a world less divided, less artificial and closer to nature, even if that vision often told us as much about European longing as about Native American reality.