The Hanging Gardens of JSTOR

Here comes the horniest sentence you’ll read this week: I was up late-ish last night reading about museum management software and I ended up wandering into an article from the 50s on museum catalog management theory by Walter S. Dunn Jr. I’ll be honest, it was a mixed bag. Museumists opining about Museumism is pretty dense thicket and so far the going is slow and face-smacking. If you know anyone who’s obsessed with how collections of historical objects should be structured/organized, or if you know any good resources for this sort of thing (books, articles, sites, etc) please let me know.

But the most obvious upside so far has been rediscovering JSTOR. I hadn’t logged in here in eons, but I spent much of my college life on it because for Classics departments worldwide it’s something of a flying saucer darting through the skies of every ancient civilization who bothered to write anything down. As time has gone on, its landing gears have acclimated to the less paved terrains of pre-Industrial life and now it seems you can safely land just about anywhere and walk about at your leisure.

As an example of the sort of shit you can oink around in like a pig there, I spent this morning lost in the conjoined Babylonian/Assyrian sauce by way of D. W .W. Stevenson’s piece A Proposal for the Irrigation of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, an entry from vol. 54 of IRAQ, an academic journal on regional historical and archeological ephemera from the British Institute for the Study of Iraq which has been viewing its much older neighbor to the East through a dusty, colonial monocle since the early 1930s. I’ll be honest, Stevenson has real chops here and I cannot recommend this piece enough if you’ve ever wondered about the Hanging Gardens themselves (perhaps the most elusive of the ancient wonders of the world) or how historians and other retrophiliacs corral raw ancient fragments into digestible academic food by way of sleuthy archival heat. Signing up for JSTOR is also worth the handful of clicks and keystrokes it will take. You have access to up to 100 article reads for free each month, and there is enough public access art and imagery on there to power the sun.

My quest for creating the perfect archive continues, and in the meantime I’ve included a few diagrams from Stevenson’s conclusion below for those of you who don’t want to wade through the 13 pages or so of his essay to find out how he thinks the whole thing may have worked.