What are some good books about the mythology of the ancient world?

Specifically... Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

He himself didn’t say he banned Christmas, however his political party did ban Christmas (1647) at the time albeit unsuccessfully (nobody listened to them). There’s no evidence an order came from him but still it was banned by the puritans, of which he was one.

Remember the 20 year rule. Comments on the current situation in Iran are not appropriate.

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Lack of reproducibility has nothing to with the fidelity that you’re talking about and the entire article goes on to defend the practice against those criticisms

Way to tell me you read until you met the first thing that reconfirmed your opinions

If you want high fidelity in forensics, you def don’t want to hear about bite mark or shoe print analysis

What about 'The Gentleman Soldier'?

"facial sculpturing techniques has been widely criticized by forensic scientists for its lack of scientific reproduction of the final product and for its low statistical success rates"

Think ill go by the forensic expertsmate

Do they celebrate winter Solstice or some ancient Scythian holiday?

The Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Both sides took heavy losses which included the leaders of both armies, the Ottoman sultan Murad I and Lazar Hrebeljanović.

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/skeletal-remains-identification-facial-reconstruction

Here’s a quick case study of positively ID’ed bodies by family members

You seem to be just running off your opinion that its totally inaccurate, when its obviously accurate enough for family members to recognize loved ones through reconstruction

Have you ever seen those police reconstructions? They never once actually look like the person. I'll say it again, they can't even get it right on people we know what they looked like. The human skull has very little differences person to person. You can tell if they had some diseases and such IF you an get dna from it. But what someone looked like accurately? Not a chance

Or possibly reconstructions from like, a decade ago

I think they're conflating the whole "shrink-wrap" effect dinosaurs have with their fossil reconstructions and the human reconstruction process.

Feathers on dinosaurs and soft tissue on bone are entirely different things

See that’s what clued me in

And considering the same facial reconstruction techniques are used to positively ID crime victims, calling them utter BS is a bit of a judgement call I don’t think you know enough to make

It's actually a well known thing. How many fossils have you seen of dinosaurs that show feathers? These facial reconstructions are known to be utter bs, they can't even get it right on people that we know what they looked like

Your old grudges are the very thing keeping us from progressing as a society.

There are for example, the Herculaneum Papyri (buried by the eruption of the Vesuvius, but which xray technology now allows us to decipher). Egypt, too, has delivered many documents preserved by the arid conditions, and of course, we have a score of inscriptions on hard surfaces like stone.

As to the veracity, consider this article , it does a nice job explaining.

So, there are layers to this.

Yes there are quite a lot of primary documents from antiquity. The easiest ones to find: engraved texts. That's how we managed to recreate for example the Res Gestae, a kind of autobiography/propaganda made by the emperor Augustus: we found several copies of it in ruins.

Then, texts on paper: we have those too. Quite a lot actually, but not from the region of Rome or Greece... but Egypt (which was under Greek then Roman control). The dry climate is excellent for the conservation of papyri. So we regularly find new fragments there. Often it's everyday stuff (personal or even legal writings like a will) which are a gold mine for historians but there are also quite a lot of fragment of ancient texts. Which help us with the next part: how can we know if our texts are exact?

So. First thing to understand: with very very few exception: we do not have complete primary documents from antiquity. We rely on copy and sometimes fragments that concur with the copies. Which for example help us establish that one major text from Antiquity had a fixed form relatively early in its history: the Bible. It also confirmed that our Homeric texts are also correct (since those were used in school we have quite a lot of them). And no, ancient text did not survive a thousand years, they were regularly copied.

So with taking that into account how can we know that we have the exact copy? We usually can't and we need to accept that. Usually not because of malicious intent, but due to mistakes. What we can have are usually close approximations though. First, we compare texts. We trace the origin of manuscripts and see if they have the same text: if a manuscript copied from a French manuscript and one copied from one that originally comes from Constantinople what's more likely is that it's the correct one. Same idea with differences, if only one text differ we assume that it's wrong. If one version is more complex we assume that it's the right one though (since simplifying is more likely to happen that increased complexity). And so on and so on and so on.

Now censorship. To be honest it had happened at times, it's pretty blatant (the usual non christian writing that says stuff like "and in Judea came a man that was the true son of the One God" and stuff). But usually it's rare and we see it. So don't worry about that.

I want to add one final thing though, that underlines your question... Christian monks and Arab copyists are not in anyway more likely suspects than your average ancient copyist. If they did not like a text, or did not care, they did not record it (this actually happened before the Christian era too, books needed to be copied regularly, it's long and expensive). If they copied a text, that's because they had an interest in it. And medieval scientist and philosophers would not dare modify ancient texts, why would they? Those are their work tools. They know they were pagans, and may try a lot in their commentary to justify that "no if they knew about Jesus/the Prophet they would totally have converted" or so. But they didn't touch the text (again the exceptions we have are far and few).

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This is on one hand super cool and on the other hand super underwhelming since he looks exactly like I would picture an Italian monk of the time… like this is the blueprint

That’s true, thanks for the correction. I agree that Robert de Hauteville’s story is underrated

They couldn't conquer Britain but they also couldn't lose. On it's own Britain had no means of returning to continental Europe.

Germany lost the war with it's Soviet misadventure.

It's not so much that the Norse learned French, it's that the Norse settlement in Normandy tended to be localized to certain places like Rouen, and on the whole did not displace the native Franks, who remained the majority. The Norse also intermarried with the native Franks almost immediately, so by the time you get to William the Conqueror's day the Norse had long since been absorbed by the Frankish majority. The Normans of William's day spoke a dialect of French, because their ancestors had also been Franks.