If you want to prepare for a career practicing law, you could do much worse than joining Harvard University’s debate team. But if, far on the other end of the spectrum of the American experience, you end up deep on the wrong side of the law, going to prison rather than college, you need not relinquish your dreams of excelling at this traditional intellectual sport. We now have the precedent to prove it: "Months after winning a national title," reports the Guardian‘s Lauren Gambino, "Harvard’s debate team has fallen to a group of New York prison inmates." "The showdown," which revolved around the question of whether public schools should be allowed to turn away undocumented students, "took place at the Eastern correctional facility in New York, a maximum-security prison where convicts can take courses taught by faculty from nearby Bard College, and where inmates have formed a popular debate club." They call this program the Bard Prison Initiative, under which inmates have the chance to earn a Bard College degree (through a non-vocational "liberal arts curriculum, including literature, foreign language, philosophy, history and the social sciences, mathematics, science, and the arts") at satellite campuses established in six New York state prisons. You can see this selective, rigorous and highly unusual educational institution in action in the Washington Post video above. And also in a 2011 PBS News Hour profile below. The Bard Prison Initiative’s debate victory over Harvard made for a notable event in the program’s history indeed. "But it’s also worth pointing out," writes Peter Holley, author of the Post article, "the fallacy of our underlying assumptions about such a matchup — the first (and most pernicious) being that criminals aren’t smart. If a definitive link between criminality and below-average intelligence exists, nobody has found it." The Bard Prison Initiative has operated on that premise since 2001, and its debate team’s previous high-profile win saw it beating that of West Point — all, you may hardly believe, through old-fashioned research, without any kind of access to the internet. If you’d like to leave your condolences for the Harvard College Debating Union, you may do so at their Facebook page. You can also make a worthwhile financial contribution to the Bard Prison Initiative here. Related Content: James Baldwin Debates Malcolm X (1963) and William F. Buckley (1965): Vintage Video & Audio Norman Mailer & Marshall McLuhan Debate the Electronic Age Clash of the Titans: Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature & Power on Dutch TV, 1971 The Historic LSD Debate at MIT: Timothy Leary v. Professor Jerome Lettvin (1967) 1150 Free Online Courses from Top Universities Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Inmates in New York Prison Defeat Harvard’s Debate Team: A Look Inside the Bard Prison Initiative is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

UK film monthly magazine Sight & Sound’s most recent issue is dedicated to "The Female Gaze: 100 Overlooked Films Directed by Women." The list of 100 films runs some 20 pages, and the edition also collects mini essays from actors like Greta Gerwig, Isabelle Huppert, and Tilda Swinton; directors like Jane Campion and Claire Denis, and critics like Amy Taubin and Camille Paglia, all focusing on female-directed films that deserve a second look. Many of the filmmakers are fairly obscure, but even better known directors are represented here with lesser-known selections, like Ida Lupino’s Outrage (and not her noir classic The Hitchhiker) and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Loveless, her first feature co-directed with Monty Montgomery and featuring a young Willem Dafoe. (Fact: Until Bigelow won for The Hurt Locker in 2010, no woman had earned a Best Director Oscar). Presented in chronological order, the list of 100 Overlooked Films Directed by Women features many landmarks in film history, like Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the first feature-length animated film, which we recently highlighted here. Open Culture has also previously discussed Germaine Dulac’s 1928 surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman. Lois Weber’s 1913 Suspense, her short film co-directed with Philippe Smalley (view it at the top of the post), is one of the first examples of cross-cutting to create tension, and it even features a three-way split frame. Cross-cutting is a technique all thrillers have used since. (And Weber stars in the film as well.) Sight & Sound also profiles Stephanie Rothman, the first female director to work for Roger Corman, and her 1971 film The Velvet Vampire, a West Coast take on a gothic genre. Jessie Maple, who made Will in 1981, was the first African-American woman to become a part of New York’s camera operator’s union. Then there’s the careers of filmmakers whose lives were cut short: Soviet director Larisa Shepitko died in a car crash at 40, leaving behind two masterpieces, while Elia Kazan’s wife Barbara Loden made her debut with Wanda in 1970 and passed away soon after, too young. Many of these films are difficult or impossible to find, and Sight & Sound includes an online article of eight more films that might be lost for good, like the aforementioned Lois Weber’s only color film White Heat, or the only film actor Lillian Gish directed, Remodeling Her Husband. The Sight & Sound issue is available on newsstands and as a digital edition to subscribers. As noted at the end of the article’s introduction, "a season related to this project will take place next year at BFI Southbank, London." Readers interested in the contributions of women filmmakers will want to explore the Women Film Pioneers website hosted by Columbia University. Related Content: The Groundbreaking Silhouette Animations of Lotte Reiniger: Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and More An Ambitious List of 1400 Films Made by Female Filmmakers Alice Guy-Blaché: The First Female Director & the Cinematic Trailblazer You Likely Never Heard Of Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. 100 Overlooked Films Directed by Women: See Selections from Sight & Sound Magazine’s New List is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

When you learned about The Periodic Table of Elements in high school, it probably didn’t look like this. Above, we have a different way of visualizing the elements. Created by Professor William F. Sheehan at Santa Clara University in 1970, this chart takes the elements (usually shown like this) and scales them relative to their abundance on the Earth’s surface. In the small print beneath the chart, Sheehan notes "The chart emphasizes that in real life a chemist will probably meet O, Si, Al [Oxygen, Silicon and Aluminum] and that he better do something about it." Click here to see the chart — and the less abundant elements — in a larger format. Below we have a few more creative takes on the Periodic Table. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. via Pickover Related Content: "The Periodic Table Table" — All The Elements in Hand-Carved Wood World’s Smallest Periodic Table on a Human Hair "The Periodic Table of Storytelling" Reveals the Elements of Telling a Good Story Chemistry on YouTube: "Periodic Table of Videos" Wins SPORE Prize Free Online Chemistry Courses   The Periodic Table of Elements Scaled to Show The Elements’ Actual Abundance on Earth is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The border-obsessed map animator known as Emperor Tigerstar views war from a distance. The Emperor leaves such details as journal entries, letters home, and tales of valor and cowardice for other history buffs. His niche is meticulously clocking the defeat and triumph in terms of shifting territories, by year, by fortnight, and, in the case of World War I and World War II, by day. His five minute take on the American Civil War, above, leaves out most of the hair-raising small scale skirmishes familiar from the pages of The Red Badge of Courage. Trans-Mississippi Theater aside, it also makes plain how little ground the Confederates gained after 1861. The Blue and the Gray are here represented by blue and red, with the mustard-colored disputed border states picking sides before the first minute is out. (The Union’s Naval Blockade is in formation within seconds.) Legend: Maroon = Confederate States of America and territories Red = Areas occupied by Confederate forces Pink = Gains for that Day Dark Blue = United States of America and territories Blue = Areas occupied by Union forces. Light blue = Gains for that day Yellow = Border states / disputed areas. The magnitude is moving, especially when paired with ground-level observations, be they fictional, historical or eyewitness. Even the place-names on the map, which now were merely quaint, would take on the sound of crackling flame and distant thunder, the Biblical, Indian and Anglo-Saxon names of hamlets and creeks and crossroads, for the most part unimportant in themselves until the day when the armies came together, as often by accident as on purpose, to give the scattered names a permanence and settle what manner of life future generations were to lead.   Historian Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative Related Content: Watch World War I Unfold in a 6 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1914 to 1918 Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945 "The Civil War and Reconstruction," a New MOOC by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Historian Eric Foner Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday Animated Map Lets You Watch the Unfolding of Every Day of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Creative Commons image by Joe Haupt Before the internet became our primary source of information and entertainment—before it became for many companies a primary revenue stream—it promised to revolutionize education. We would see a democratic spread of knowledge, old hierarchies would crumble, ancient divisions would cease to matter in the new primordial cyber-soup where anyone with entry-level consumer hardware and the patience to learn basic HTML could create a platform and a community. And even as that imagined utopia became just another economy, with its own winners and losers, large—and free—educational projects still seemed perfectly feasible. These days, that potential hasn’t exactly evaporated, but we’ve had an increasing number of reasons—the threatened status of net neutrality prominent among them—to curb our enthusiasm. Yet as we remind you daily here at Open Culture, free educational resources still abound online, even if the online world isn’t as radical as some radicals had hoped. Frequently, those resources reside in online libraries like the Internet Archive, who store some of the best educational material from pre-internet times—such as the NBC University Theater, a program that comes from another transitional time for another form of mass media: radio. Before payola and television took over in the fifties, radio also showed great potential for democratizing education. In 1942, at the height of the Golden Age of Radio, NBC "reinaugurated" a previous concept for what it called the NBC University of the Air. "Throughout the mid-1940s," writes the Digital Deli, an online museum of golden age radio, "NBC produced some twenty-five productions specifically designed to both educate and entertain. Indeed, many of those programs were incorporated into the curricula of high schools, colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Canada." After 1948, the program was retooled as NBC University Theater, then simply NBC Theater. "Irrespective of the title change," however, the program "continued to maintain the same high standards and continued to expand the number of colleges offering college credit for listening to and studying the programs’s offerings." Digital Deli has the full details of this proto-MOOC’s curriculum. It consists of listening to adaptations of "great American stories," great "world" stories-from Voltaire, Swift, and others-and adaptations of modern American and British fiction and "Great Works of World Literature." In short, the NBC University Theater adaptations might substitute for a college-level literary education for those unable to attend a college or university. In the playlist above, you can hear every episode from the show’s final run from 1948 to 1951. We begin with an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and end with Thomas Hardy’s "The Withered Arm." In-between hear classic radio drama adaptations of everything from Austen to Faulkner and Hemingway to Ibsen. There are 110 episodes in total. Each episode features commentary from distinguished authors and critics, including Robert Penn Warren, E.M. Forster, and Katherine Anne Porter. "Apart from the obvious academic value" of the series, writes Digital Deli, "it’s clear that considerable thought—and daring—went into the selections as well." Despite the tremendous increase in college attendance through the G.I. Bill, this was a period of "rising hostility towards academics, purely intellectual pursuits, and the free exchange of philosophies in general." The ensuing decade of the fifties might be characterized culturally, writes Digital Deli, as an "intellectual vacuum"—anti-intellectual attitudes swept the country, fueled by Cold War political repression. And radio became primarily a means of entertainment and advertising, competing with television for an audience. Quality radio dramas continued—most notably of excellent science fiction. But never again would an educational program of NBC University Theater‘s scope, ambition, and radical potential appear on U.S. radio waves. Related Content: Hear the Very First Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Starring David Niven (1949) Hear Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and 84 Classic Radio Dramas from CBS Radio Workshop (1956-57) Dimension X: The 1950s SciFi Radio Show That Dramatized Stories by Asimov, Bradbury, Vonnegut & More Free: Listen to 298 Episodes of the Vintage Crime Radio Series, Dragnet Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness NBC University Theater Adapts Great Novels to Radio & Gives Listeners College Credit : Hear 110 Episodes from a 1940s eLearning Experiment is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Sherlock Holmes has become such a cultural fixture since he first appeared in print that all of us have surely, at one time or another, considered reading through the London detective’s complete case files. But where to start? One can always begin at the beginning with that first print appearance, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet. But how best to progress through the Sherlock Holmes canon, a body of 56 short stories and four novels (and that number counting only the material written by Conan Doyle himself), some more essential than others? You might consider reading the adventures of Sherlock Holmes according to the preferences of Sherlock Holmes’ creator. We know these preferences because of a 1927 competition in The Strand Magazine, where the character’s popularity first blew up, which asked readers to name the twelve best Sherlock Holmes stories. They asked Conan Doyle the same question, and the list he came up with runs as follows: "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" ("a grim story" that "I am sure will be on every list") "The Redheaded League" "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" (due, as with "The Redheaded League," to "the originality of the plot") "The Final Problem" ("we could hardly leave out the story which deals with the only foe who ever really extended Holmes, and which deceived the public (and Watson) into the erroneous inference of his death") "A Scandal in Bohemia" (since, as the first short story in the series, "it opened the path for the others," and "it has more female interest than is usual") "The Adventure of the Empty House" ("the story which esssays the difficult task of explaining away the alleged death of Holmes") "The Five Orange Pips" ("though it is short it has a certain dramatic quality of its own") "The Adventure of the Second Stain" (for its treatment of "high diplomacy and intrigue") "The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot" ("grim and new") "The Adventure of the Priory School" ("worth a place if only for the dramatic moment when Holmes points his finger at the Duke") "The Musgrave Ritual" (for its inclusion of "a historical touch which gives it a little added distinction" and "a memory from Holmes’ early life") "The Reigate Squires" (in which "on the whole, Holmes himself shows perhaps the most ingenuity") He later added seven more favorites, including some he’d written after The Strand‘s contest took place: "Silver Blaze" "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" "The Crooked Man" "The Man with the Twisted Lip" "The Greek Interpreter" "The Resident Patient" "The Naval Treaty" "When this competition was first mooted I went into it in a most light-hearted way," wrote Conan Doyle, "thinking that it would be the easiest thing in the world to pick out the twelve best of the Holmes stories. In practice I found that I had engaged myself in a serious task." And those who call themselves Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts know that, though they may have begun reading the stories with an equally light heart, they soon found themselves going deeper and deeper into Holmes’ world in a much more serious way than they’d expected. Starting with Conan Doyle’s selections may set you down the very same path; when you finally come out the other side, feel free to name your own top twelve stories in the comments below. For a quick way to read Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, get The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Related Content: Download the Complete Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Masterpiece Arthur Conan Doyle Discusses Sherlock Holmes and Psychics in a Rare Filmed Interview (1927) Hear the Voice of Arthur Conan Doyle After His Death Read the Lost Sherlock Holmes Story That Was Just Discovered in an Attic in Scotland Watch John Cleese as Sherlock Holmes in The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It Download 55 Free Online Literature Courses: From Dante and Milton to Kerouac and Tolkien Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Arthur Conan Doyle Names His 19 Favorite Sherlock Holmes Stories is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Creative Commons image by Gorthian Mind Webs, a 1970’s radio series created by WHA Radio in Wisconsin, featured dramatized readings of classic sci fi stories by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. You can learn more about the series, and access a complete set of recordings here. Below, we’ve highlighted for you a dramatization of an Ursula K. Le Guin story, "The End." It’s rare to encounter an audio recording of a Le Guin story online, so we hope you enjoy. "The End" is now added to our collection: 700 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. And if you’re looking to immerse yourself in Le Guin’s fiction, give her groundbreaking novel The Left Hand of Darkness a try. It won the Hugo and Nebula Awards (the top award for fantasy/sci-fi novels) in 1969. https://archive.org/download/MindWebs_201410/The%20End%20-%20Ursula%20Le%20Guin.mp3 Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here. And note this: Audiobooks.com also has a free trial offer where you can download a free audiobook. Details. Hear Ursula K. Le Guin’s Story, "The End" Dramatized: A Rare Audio Treat is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

In 1919, German architect Walter Gropius founded Bauhaus, the most influential art school of the 20th century. Bauhaus defined modernist design and radically changed our relationship with everyday objects. Gropius wrote in his manifesto Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar that "There is no essential difference between the artist and the artisan." His new school, which featured faculty that included the likes of Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky, did indeed erase the centuries-old line between applied arts and fine arts. Bauhaus architecture sandblasted away the ornate flourishes common with early 20th century buildings, favoring instead the clean, sleek lines of industrial factories. Designer Marcel Breuer reimagined the common chair by stripping it down to its most elemental form. Herbert Bayer reinvented and modernized graphic design by focusing on visual clarity. Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt and Christian Dell radically remade such diverse objects as fabrics and tea kettles. Nowadays, of course, getting one of those Bauhaus tea kettles, or even an original copy of Gropius’s manifesto, would cost a small fortune. Fortunately for design nerds, typography mavens and architecture enthusiasts everywhere, the good folks over at Monoskop have posted online a whole set of beautifully designed publications from the storied school. Click here to pick out individual works or here to just get all of them. Sadly, though, you can’t download a teakettle. The list of Books in the Monoskop Bauhaus archive includes: 1. Walter Gropius (ed.), Internationale Architektur, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925. 2. Paul Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925, 50 pp. Pedagogical Sketchbook, intro. & trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1953 (in English) Παιδαγωγικό Σημειωματάριο, trans. Β. Λαγοπούλου, 1976. (in Greek) Pedagogikheskie eskizy, trans. N. Druzhkovoy, 2005. (in Russian) 3. Adolf Meyer (ed.), Ein Versuchshaus des Bauhauses in Weimar, Munich: Albert Langen, 1924. 4. Die Bühne am Bauhaus, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925. The Theater of the Bauhaus, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. (in English) 5. Piet Mondrian, Neue Gestaltung, Neoplastizimus, Nieuwe Beelding, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925. 6. Theo van Doesburg, Grundbegriffe der neuen gestaltenden Kunst, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925. Principles of Neo-Plastic Art, London: Lund Humphries, 1969. (in English) 7. Walter Gropius (ed.), Neue Arbeiten der Bauhauswerkstäffen, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925. 8. L. Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Fotografie, Film, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925, 115 pp; 2nd ed., 1927, 140 pp. Incl. "Dynamik der Gross-Stadt." Painting Photography Film, trans. Janet Seligman, London: Lund Humphries, 1969. (in English) 9. Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche: Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente, Munich: Albert Langen, 1926. Point and Line to Plane: Contribution to the Analysis of the Pictorial Elements, trans. Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1947, 200 pp. (in English) 10. J.J.P. Oud, Holländische Architektur, Munich: Albert Langen, 1929. 11. Kasimir Malewitsch, Die gegenstandslose Welt, Munich: Albert Langen, 1927. 12. Walter Gropius, Bauhausbauten Dessau, Munich: Albert Langen, 1930. 13. Albert Gleizes, Kubismus, Munich: Albert Langen, 1928. 14. László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zur Architektur, Munich: Albert Langen, 1929, 241 pp; facsimile repr., Mainz and Berlin: Florian Kupferberg, 1968. The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, trans. Daphne M. Hoffman, New York: Breuer Warren and Putnam, 1930; exp.rev.ed. as The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, New York: George Wittenborn, 1947, 92 pp. (in English) And here are some key Bauhaus journals: bauhaus 1 (1926). 5 pages, 42 cm. Download (23 MB). bauhaus: zeitschrift für bau und gestaltung 2:1 (Feb 1928). Download (17 MB). bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung 3:1 (Jan 1929). Download (17 MB). bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung 3:2 (Apr-Jun 1929). Download (15 MB). bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung 3:3 (Jul-Sep 1929). Download (16 MB). bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung 2 (Jul 1931). Download (15 MB). Get more in the Monoskop Bauhaus archive. Related Content: The Homemade Hand Puppets of Bauhaus Artist Paul Klee Time Travel Back to 1926 and Watch Wassily Kandinsky Create an Abstract Composition Bauhaus, Modernism & Other Design Movements Explained by New Animated Video Series Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here. Download Original Bauhaus Books & Journals for Free: Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy & More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Creative Commons image by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin When one enters the world of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest epic poem we know of, one enters a world lost to time. Though its strange gods and customs would have seemed perfectly natural to its inhabitants, the culture of Gilgamesh has so far receded from historical memory that there’s little left with which we might identify. Scholars believe Gilgamesh the demi-god mythological character may have descended from legends (such as a 126-year reign and superhuman strength) told about a historical 5th king of Uruk. Buried under the fantastic stories lies some documentary impulse. On the other hand, Gilgamesh—like all mythology—exists outside of time. Gilgamesh and Enkidu always kill the Bull of Heaven, again and again forever. That, perhaps, is the secret Gilgamesh discovers at the end of his long journey, the secret of Keats’ Grecian Urn: eternal life resides only in works of art. And perhaps the only way to approach some common understanding of myths as both products of their age and as archetypes in realms of pure thought comes through a deep immersion in their historical languages. In the case of Gilgamesh, that means learning the extraordinarily long-lived Akkadian, a Mesopotamian language that dates from about 2,800 BCE to around 100 CE. In order to do so, archeologists and Assyriologists had to decipher fragments of cuneiform stone tablets like those on which Gilgamesh was discovered. The task proved exceptionally difficult, such that when George Smith announced his translation of the epic’s so-called "Flood Tablet" in 1872, it had lain "undisturbed in the [British] Museum for nearly 20 years," writes The Telegraph, since "there were so few people in the world able to read ancient cuneiform." Cuneiform is not a language, but an alphabet. The script’s wedge-shaped letters (cuneus is Latin for wedge) are formed by impressing a cut reed into soft clay. It was used by speakers of several Near Eastern languages including Sumerian, Akkadian, Urartian and Hittite; depending on the language and date of a given script, its alphabet could consist of many hundreds of letters. If this weren’t challenging enough, cuneiform employs no punctuation (no sentences or paragraphs), it does not separate words, there aren’t any vowels and most tablets are fragmented and eroded. Nonetheless, Smith, an entirely self-educated scholar, broke the code, and when he discovered the fragment containing a flood narrative that predated the Biblical account by at least 1,000 years, he reportedly "became so animated that, mute with excitement, he began to tear his clothes off." That story may also be legend, but it is one that captures the passionately obsessive character of George Smith. Thanks to his efforts, those of many other 19th century academics, treasure hunters, and tomb raiders, and modern scholars toiling away at the University of London, we can now hear Gilgamesh read not only in Old Akkadian (the original language), but also later Babylonian dialects, the languages used to record the Code of Hammurabi and a later, more fragmented version of the Gilgamesh epic. The University of London’s Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Ancient Near East hosts on its website several readings in different scholars’ voices of Gilgamesh, The Epic of Anzu, the Codex Hammurabi and other Babylonian texts. Above, you can hear Karl Hecker read the first 163 lines of Tablet XI of the Standard Akkadian Gilgamesh. These lines tell the story of Utnapishtim, the mythical and literary precursor to the Biblical Noah. So important was the discovery of this flood story that it "challenged literary and biblical scholarship and would help to redefine beliefs about the age of the Earth," writes The Telegraph. When George Smith made his announcement in 1872, "even the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, was in attendance." Unfortunately, things did not end well for Smith, but because of his efforts, we can come as close as possible to the sound of Gilgamesh’s world, one that may remind us of a great many modern languages, but that uniquely preserves ancient history and ageless myth. The University of London site also includes translations and transliterations of the cuneiform writing, from Professor Andrew George’s 2003 The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts. Furthermore, there are answers to Frequently Asked Questions, many of which you may yourself be asking, such as "What are Babylonian and Assyrian?"; "Given they are dead, how can one tell how Babylonian and Assyrian were pronounced?"; "Did Babylonian and Assyrian poetry have rhyme and metre, like English poetry?"; and—for those with a desire to enter further into the ancient world of Gilgamesh and other Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian semi-mythical figures—"What if I actually want to learn Babylonian and Assyrian?" Then, of course, you’ll want to learn about the 20 new lines from Gilgamesh just discovered in Iraq…. Related Content: Listen to the Oldest Song in the World: A Sumerian Hymn Written 3,400 Years Ago Hear the "Seikilos Epitaph," the Oldest Complete Song in the World: An Inspiring Tune from 100 BC Hear Beowulf Read In the Original Old English: How Many Words Do You Recognize? Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in its Original Ancient Language, Akkadian is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

In modern times, we don’t regard female musicians as in and of themselves unusual. Our rosters of favorite rockers, pop-stars, solo singer-songwriters, and what have you might well feature as many women as men — or, depending on the subgenre, many more women than men. But those of us who listen to a great deal of classical music might feel a tad sheepish about how much more heavily male our playlists slant, at least in terms of the composers. For a variety of historical and cultural reasons, the classical canon can feel like a man’s world indeed. But it doesn’t have to! The Spotify playlist above, "1200 Years of Women Composers: From Hildegard To Higdon," reveals that women started shaping what we now know as classical music far longer ago than most of us realize. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, download it here.) The playlist, which contains over 900 pieces and will take you days to listen to, begins in medieval times with the Byzantine abbess, poet, composer, and hymnographer Kassia (shown above) and ends with female composers from around the world not only living but (especially by the standards of those who write orchestral music) still young, like Misato Mochizuki, Helena Tulve, and Lera Auerbach. This comes arranged by Spotify Classical Playlists, whose site describes how the playlist offers not just an anthology of women composers, but also "a brief history of western classical music. It’s really fascinating to hear music constantly reinventing itself from the monophonic and deeply spiritual medieval chant of Hildegard [of Bingen] all the way into Higdon’s lush and ultra-modern percussion concerto." And before you begin this epic listen, bear in mind the quote from Faust that appears there: "Das Ewig Weibliche Zieht ins hinan" — "The eternal feminine leads us upwards." Related Content: Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938- 2014) Stream 58 Hours of Free Classical Music Selected to Help You Study, Work, or Simply Relax Hear All of Mozart in a Free 127-Hour Playlist Hear Classical Music Composed by Friedrich Nietzsche: 43 Original Tracks Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. 1200 Years of Women Composers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.