Reminds me of this quote from Tonya Riley's _The Staff Engineer's Path_:

> In The Art of Travel (Vintage), Alain de Botton talks about the frustration of learning new information that doesn’t connect to anything you already know—like the sorts of facts you might pick up while visiting a historic building in a foreign land. He writes about visiting Madrid’s Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande and learning that “the sixteenth-century stalls in the sacristy and chapter house come from the Cartuja de El Paular, the Carthusian monastery near Segovia.” Without a connection back to something he was already familiar with, the description couldn’t spark his excitement or curiosity. The new facts, he wrote, were “as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.”

Uh, probably it would have been a place to be avoided for a non-Arab

Like, modern and understandable? I ask because English from more than a few hundred years ago is basically gibberish so I’m curious about languages where that didn’t happen.

I would expect no less from a graduate of the University of Warsaw.

This writing (and speaking) style permeates this institution.

>That was interesting, notwithstanding the editorialising comments by Tomasz Barański.

you are upset by these comments which this article's author chose to quote?:

As lead author Tomasz Barański explains, however, this transformation was far from sudden. "Nubia was not a marginal or isolated region of the Nile Valley, but a pivotal corridor connecting the Mediterranean world to sub-Saharan Africa. Rather than a civilizational dead end, Nubia functioned for millennia as a dynamic zone of movement for people, goods, and ideas. Through Nubia passed commodities such as gold, ivory, and enslaved people, but it also enabled the exchange of less tangible elements: technologies, religious beliefs, and political models.

"Moreover, Nubian communities were not passive recipients of outside influence; they actively shaped and adapted the flows passing through this corridor. This long history of exchange helps us understand later cultural transformations in the region, including Arabization and Islamization. These were not sudden ruptures, but part of a much older pattern of interaction, negotiation, and adaptation that has characterized Sudan throughout history."

Barański notes that further discoveries may yet follow: "Preliminary analysis of the letters from Building A.1 suggests distinct patterns in the circulation of correspondence, hinting at a coherent communication network. This network encompassed not only the city's religious and administrative elites, but possibly also the leaders of nomadic groups herding flocks in the surrounding regions."

Additionally, he adds, "the discovery of this seemingly inconspicuous scrap of paper, when situated within the larger context of gift-giving culture and traditional royal patronage navigating local micropolitics, provides a vivid example of how archaeological fieldwork continues to produce material that bridges the gap between material culture and written history."