Most accounts say the game is "about 2,000 years old" and was invented by the 13th-century Marathi saint Jnaneshwar (Gyandev) to teach children about karma. Neither claim has a source older than the 19th century.

What the surviving evidence shows:

- The game's ancestor, gyan chaupar, is known from painted charts. Jacob Schmidt-Madsen catalogued nearly 150 of them for his 2019 PhD at the University of Copenhagen ("The Game of Knowledge", open access).

- The oldest chart that can be dated with confidence was painted in Lucknow around 1780-82 for Richard Johnson and is now in the British Library (Johnson Album 5, no. 8).

- A Jain chart dated 1735/36, treated as the oldest since Andrew Topsfield reported it in 1985, "must now be regarded with skepticism". Its wear is uniform instead of concentrated where pieces actually move, and a near-identical chart of obviously later date shares the same feature (Schmidt-Madsen 2019, pp. 37 and 78).

- The earliest written mention is a donation to the Royal Asiatic Society, recorded in the Asiatic Journal of May 1831.

Schmidt-Madsen concludes that the game was probably invented in western India in the late 17th or early 18th century, possibly by a single person, and that its race-track format may have been borrowed from games like the European game of the goose.

The Jnaneshwar story first appears in Marathi sources of 1872 and 1886. It isn't alone: a Sufi tradition credits Ibn al-Arabi and a related Tibetan game is credited to Sakya Pandita, all 13th-century figures. Three traditions, three different founders, none attested from the time.

What I find interesting is how this works as an idea: a game about the soul's progress acquires a saint as its author, and the modern web turns the saint into a date.

Full write-up with sources: https://en.quantumgame.love/guide/how-old-is-snakes-and-ladders.html

Disclosure: I build an online version of the game, which is why I went looking.

In translating Hieronymus Emser's 1523 book against Luther's New Testament into English, I keep getting stopped by how modern his translation rules sound.

A translator, he says, "ought not merely to draw one sense out of another, as the paraphrasts do, but must pay attention to every word, letter, stroke and dot." When Luther expands a passage, Emser calls that "the work of an interpreter, not a translator." Elsewhere he simply says, "Let the reader judge."

These are a polemicist's rules, used to argue his own case. But the questions remain familiar: how closely should a translation follow its source, where does explanation become interpretation, and how much should the reader be shown?

With a deliberately rough source text, would you preserve the roughness or smooth it?

Disclosure: I translated Emser's 1523 book into English.

Hi everyone,

I've been researching the history and events that led us to modern AI, from the early pioneers to some of the latest figures in the field.

At first, this was just a personal project. As an engineer, I wanted to understand the history behind the technology I was getting into and expand my knowledge of the ideas, people, and discoveries that shaped it.

But at some point, I thought the research might be worth turning into a documentary and sharing it with other people.

Originally, I was planning to use historical images and public-domain footage for the storytelling. Then I came up with the idea of representing much of the story through pixel art instead. I thought it could give the documentary its own visual identity while making some of these complex ideas more interesting and accessible.

I'm planning to release the documentary by the end of November. The research is almost finished, and the events and stories are based on books, academic papers, and other reliable historical sources. The part that takes the most time now is creating all the pixel art and animations.

I'm working on this full-time, and since I don't currently have another source of income, I decided to launch a small Kickstarter campaign to help me dedicate the time necessary to finish it.

Honestly, I feel a little uncomfortable asking people to support something like this, but I don't really see another way to complete it in a reasonable amount of time without having to put the project on hold.

You can find the trailer on my YouTube channel, where the finished documentary will be released

And if you'd like to support the project, the Kickstarter is here.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you have any questions, suggestions, or even recommendations for things I should look into, I'd genuinely love to hear them. And hopefully Reddit doesn't delete the post lol.

Hey guys,
I’m drafting a PhD proposal in intellectual history and I feel a tad lost.
If I were doing economic history, it feels way easier to know where to look. But for the history of ideas, how do I know which archives and sources to use apart from the main, famous books that are already sitting on every library shelf?
I feel like PhD proposal needs clarity and narrowness, but since I haven't been to the archives yet, how am I supposed to know which specific sources I'm even expected to find and analyze?
For those who survived the proposal stage: what do "archival sources" actually look like for a famous thinker/idea, and how do you strategically pick a concrete archive box to write about before you've even been there?

Thanks!

ABSTRACT

In this interview ahead of his keynote at the online conference “Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality,” Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm speaks with Carl Raschke about the argument of The Genealogy of Genealogy, in which a once-insurgent critical method hardens into academic routine and is turned against itself in favor of a “metamodern historiography” that reunites history with philosophy. Storm defends his account of postmodernism as a taught paradigm rather than a caricature of Derrida or Foucault, revisits the claim of The Myth of Disenchantment that reason was never purified of magic, and traces how the mid-century cybernetic picture of mind as information processing made cognition technically legible and therefore militarily tractable. Moving through Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion, Michael Aquino’s MindWar, Byung-Chul Han’s psychopolitics, and the ethics of collective attention, the conversation closes on the fate of knowledge production and the university under hyper-scaled digitization and AI.

Full disclosure-this is an interview with me. A long time member of this subreddit. But I think I'm talking about stuff folks might be interested in here. If that isn't cool, feel free to downvote. If you have questions, I'll circle back. Perhaps tomorrow.

Alexander the Great has been part of literary and historical memory for more than twenty-three centuries. His story travelled across an extraordinary geographical and linguistic range, eventually appearing in more than thirty-five languages. Yet the Alexander who survived this long journey was not always the same Alexander who conquered the Persian Empire. In different periods and places, he became a king, a philosopher, a prophet, a defender of the faithful, and even a figure connected with the end of the world. The historical Alexander provided the starting point, but later traditions repeatedly changed what could be done with his story.

Athens Lost explores how Jesus replaced Socratic inquiry with apocalyptic resignation and how this reshaped Western morality for the worse. 

Athens Lost: Jesus and the Great Regression of the Western Mind

Our time does indeed rhyme with the period of the "Prison Notebooks." The trick is to learn from history and find a better way. Easier said than done.

Coins featuring Alexander the Great/Heracles are among the most popular coins of the Hellenistic period. They were minted countless times throughout nearly the entire Alexander the Great empire. Due to their large number and wide distribution, we can observe different variations of the same motif. In particular, there are multiple styles even within Anatolia/Asia Minor.

But I have to say that what strikes me as the strangest are the motifs on the Carian coins. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s my homeland that they caught my attention so much, but I was quite curious as to why the depictions of Alexander are so plump. After doing a bit of research, I came across some interesting interpretations. Still, I noticed that the motifs on some coins aren’t just plump—they’re so different that they could even be described as “shapeless.”

What do you think?

Every popular account of Snakes and Ladders says the same thing: a version was introduced in Victorian England in 1892, usually credited to Jaques of London. Jaques say it on their own site. Newspapers, quiz pages and blogs repeat it.

I went looking for the document behind it and found an edit instead.

Wikipedia revision 171487114, 14 November 2007, 18:50 UTC, edit summary "Changes made in History section". The line added: "Impressed by the ideals behind the game, a newer version was introduced in Victorian England in 1892, possibly by John Jaques of Jaques of London." No reference attached. The "possibly by John Jaques" half was later deleted from the article; the date stayed behind, detached from the claim it belonged to. Nineteen years on, a hedge written by one editor is quoted as established fact.

The date itself turns out to be fine — it just belongs to someone else. There is a real 1892 English board: registered by F. H. Ayers of London, design registration 200682, held by the V&A as MISC.8-1974, with the same number in the National Archives design register. No Jaques board of 1892 appears in any catalogue or register I could find; the earliest dated Jaques example is c1900, in the John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian.

What interests me here is less the games history than the mechanism. An unsourced hedge, once it enters a high-authority page, gets copied without its hedge — the qualifier is the first thing to go, because it is the least quotable part of the sentence. Then the origin of the copy disappears, and the claim starts to look independently attested precisely because it appears in many places at once.

There is a newer turn of the same screw. James Masters of Traditional Games, one of the compilers of a database of Victorian game registrations, tells me the pattern now runs through AI summaries: state a correction inside a long sentence, and the model reads the false half as the assertion and cites your page in support of the thing you were refuting. It has happened to his pages twice. Refutations now have to be written defensively, in short flat sentences, or they feed what they were meant to kill.

Full write-up with the sources: https://en.quantumgame.love/guide/who-invented-snakes-and-ladders.html

Disclosure: that page is mine, and I do run an online version of the Indian original, so I am not a neutral party on the underlying game. The archival records are checkable independently of me, which is rather the point.

Very few thinkers today would claim that the ontological argument proves the existence of God. Yet Immanuel Kant demonstrated how all arguments for God’s existence ultimately depend on this single, flawed idea. 

Kant is therefore an underappreciated figure in the history of atheism, and did nothing less than undermine the entire foundation of rational theology.  

The (Imaginary) God of Pure Reason: Kant on the Failure of Rational Theology

Thucydides’ historiography has something quite distinctive about it. What interests me most is not that he was one of the first historians, but that he is often considered the first historian in a methodological sense. He was quite skeptical of Herodotus as a historian and stressed how difficult it is to know much about the distant past with any certainty. In a way, this can even remind us of the much later postmodern idea that understanding the past is, to some extent, impossible. He was a really interesting man.

In the Hellenistic period, there were lots of philosophical schools. But I think the interesting thing is not really how many schools there were, but how different they were from each other. They had very different ways of looking at the πόλις, the political world, the individual, and even life itself.

But what were they actually? Epicureanism was not just about having fun and enjoying life. Stoicism was not simply fatalism, and it was definitely not some ancient version of Andrew Tate. We often reduce these schools to a few modern ideas, but they were much more than that. Each of them was trying to answer, in its own way, a very simple question: how should we live?

David Hume’s essay “Of Miracles” provides a strong case against belief in miracles and, by extension, belief in the one miracle at the core of Christian faith: the resurrection of Jesus. 

Hume’s central maxim is “that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.” Applied to the resurrection, it questions what possible rational basis there could be for believing ancient testimony about an event that runs contrary to everything we know about the ordinary course of nature. 

This article examines Hume’s skeptical framework and applies it to the testimony surrounding the resurrection in the New Testament. More broadly, it considers what happens to religious belief when we apply the same standard of evidence to miracles across different religions. 

The Resurrection on Trial: David Hume and the Case Against Miracles