Love this!

By the way I’m pretty sure your image comes from a recovered portion of ancient Babylon’s Ishtar gate. The Detroit Institute of the Arts (which is one of the United States' least appreciated fabulous museums) has another portion featuring a dragon.

It’s thrilling to walk right up to it and see something that Alexander the Great himself rode underneath on his way into the city.

I love how correspondence from what we think of as the ancient past is so similar to things that happen today. Human nature being what it is, what we might imagine would be incredibly alien is often familiar.

I’ve read another bit of recovered correspondence from roughly the same era as you report. It’s between a father and a late adolescent son who has gone away to another city to study.

We don’t know what the son wrote to his father, but we can read the reply: No, you may not have any additional money. I’ve received reports from your teachers that you are not working as hard at your studies as you should be. You need to spend less time drinking with your friends and more time on your lessons.

That letter is thousands of years old, but how familiar it sounds!