The View from Zenodo

A number of my writings are available in PDF format at the CERN based Open Access repository Zenodo.

Why Zenodo? The repository is named after the first librarian of the Library of Alexandria, Zenodotus, whose floruit was around 280 B.C.E., and whose principal interest was editing Homer. He also introduced library metadata, which made it easier to know what was in a scroll, and where in the library it belonged. CERN has always been conscious of the importance of good metadata for the efficient management of information, so their choice of name is a good one. 

As you can see, the first articles were uploaded over a couple of days in 2018, but I didn't draw attention to them at the time because access stats were not available. Now the access stats are publicly available for each file. If you search the repository with the string: 'Yaeger, Thomas', all of the files will appear on a single page. There is also a fuller description available from the repository for each file, a DOI, and versioning information.

 The available writings are:

Magic or Magia?

Yaeger, Thomas

A discussion of the arguments in Plato's Sophist concerning the nature of what is real, and of the implications of the apparent conclusion that the One, as well as being unchanging, is also subject to change.
Uploaded on June 2, 2019 http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3237026

Language and Abstraction in Egypt and Greece

Yaeger, Thomas

A brief summary and analysis of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena Vol 3 (2006), from August 2013. This is a section from the forthcoming book Around Black Athena: The Origins of Graeco-Roman Culture
Uploaded on May 15, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247369


The Babylonian Creation

Yaeger, Thomas

The text of the Enuma Elish ('When on High' )was closely connected with the observance of the New Year’s Festival at Babylon, and it was recited at the end of the fourth day of this celebration. This Festival lasted from the first to the eleventh of the month Nisan. The Enuma Elish...

Uploaded on May 16, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247957


Frazer and the Association of Ideas

Yaeger, Thomas

Frazer devised an explanatory mechanism to explain patterns of magical thought in antiquity. This was based on the phenomenon of the association of ideas, argued by John Locke in the seventeenth century as a description of how we think. Applying this to human behaviour across history and culture...

Uploaded on May 15, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247491


Standing in the Place of Ea

Yaeger, Thomas

'Standing in the Place of Ea' is a chapter in the book Understanding Ancient Thought. It explores the role of the King in ancient Assyria, as the vizier of the god Assur. He was trained in the Adapa discipline, which is related to the myth of Adapa. He was required to be skilled in crafts...

Uploaded on May 15, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247346


Ocean and the Limit of Existence

Yaeger, Thomas

A chapter from the book, The Sacred History of Being, which explores the origins of philosophy in divine cult. Ideas about water and ocean were held in common around the Mediterranean in the first and second millennia B.C.E. These ideas are associated with creation and the generation of life...

Uploaded on May 15, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247311


The Fifty Names of Marduk

Yaeger, Thomas

The liturgy of the Babylonian creation myth, performed each year by the King and the priests, tells us about the intellectual frame of their world, as it was then understood. The physical world is a place of refuge, created by the gods to ensure the well-being of human life. The King is...

Uploaded on May 15, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247517


'I and Thou'

Yaeger, Thomas

It has been argued, essentially following the Frazerian model of antiquity, [Before Philosophy, Henri Frankfort, et al.] that, among ancient cultures the world was conceived as a place populated entirely by entities, so that relation with the things in the world was essentially understood in terms of...

Uploaded on May 16, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1248022


Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree

Yaeger, Thomas

One of the reasons for the current convention that philosophy began in Greece is a purely formal one, in that historians of western thought have taken the view that we have no direct evidence of the discussion of philosophical matters from any other cultural context (other than the Greek oikumene)...

Uploaded on May 15, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247536

May 16, 2019, and June 4 2019, TY.


The Ka and Totality in Ancient Egypt

Yaeger, Thomas

A speculative article on the significance of the Ka in Egyptian Thought. The article explores the idea that the Ka arises from fundamental questions about the nature of reality.

Uploaded September 1, 2019. At: https://zenodo.org/record/3383059#.XWupCi5Ki03 TY