An epitaph is a short lyric written in memory of someone who has died. Sometimes, epitaphs serve as elegies.These tributes are usually quite brief and may be written by anyone. The writer might be someone close to the deceased, like a family member, or even the deceased themselves. There...
They are written in iambic pentameter. This means that each line contains a total of ten syllables. These ten syllables can be divided into five sets of two, the first beat and each pairing are unstressed, and the second is stressed. The stanzas also followed the rhyme scheme of ABABBCC. ...
being on the move certainly has something to do with it. Travel memoirs have been written for as long as people could traverse land — which is to say, a long time — but the modern travel narrative didn’t crystallize until the 1970s with the publication of Paul Theroux’sGreat Railway...
The East’s professionals were also better tacticians. A Byzantine description of Gothic knights who could not use their infantry matches an Arab one of the Crusaders as “animals gifted only with courage.” European tales of Eastern “stratagems” in theFirst Crusade(1096–99) were tributes to...
The Chinese chronicles provide information about the tributes sent individually by five Japanese “kings” to Liu-Sung and Southern Ch’i during the 5th century. There are still questions about the identification of these kings, but it is generally accepted that the “king” written in Chinese ...