Temple libraries were for a constant, ongoing ...

The daily operation of the Egyptian temples involved a series of complicated ritual performances - so complicated that the priests developed various ‘handbooks’ in order to carry them out correctly.

This is why the temples gradually developed the large-scale temple libraries, according to Professor Kim Ryholt of the Carsten Niebuhr Institute.

»All temples have a library attached to it. But this is not a library in a modern sense, not a public service. The temples were not open to the public except at festivals, and no one but the priests had access to the libraries« he explains.

Fragments shed new light on the old Egyptians

Take 400 jigsaw puzzles, each of 1000 pieces. Empty all of the pieces into a box, shake the box, and then discard 90 per cent of the pieces into the waste paper basket.

Now empty the remaining pieces onto a big table, and reconstruct the 400 jigsaw puzzles from the remaining pieces.

This is like the job of Egyptologist Kim Ryholt. But only almost, as he explains with a wide grin:

»In our papyrus texts, we don’t have the interlocking joins«.

See picture gallery here.

Priestly writings

Medieval knights were stressed out

Knights in medieval battles were not all that hard under their suits of chainmail and armour.

A study by a University of Copenhagen historian Thomas Heebøll-Holm suggests that they had the same symptoms as modern troops in battle. This includes the scourge of modern troops returning from war, post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD).

Factors that dispose combat troops to post-traumatic stress were there in abundance according to his analysis of the medieval treatise ‘On Chivalry’, a kind of combat manual from around 1350 written by the French knight Geoffroi de Charny.

World’s biggest Maya conference

Spreading knowledge of the Maya language and strengthening research dialogue. The two main goals of a conference on ancient Maya culture at the University of Copenhagen.

New stories from old bones

He was struck down from behind with something blunt and hard, and his skull cracked.

He then lived on for several days, most likely in agony. This is what the lesions on his skull can tell us.

Maybe his injury was a battle wound, maybe it was just some kind of brawl. Maybe his friends helped him, transporting him by cart, maybe for days on end, to finally reach the monastery of Æbelholt in northern Sjælland. We don’t know. But he was buried - no coffin, head towards the west as is the custom - in the monastery’s churchyard.

Freak rain storm drowned skeletons

A cloudburst that dumped two months of rain on the inner city in two hours on 2 July also swamped the Æbelholt skeleton collection at the University’s Medical Museion.

The collection of 600 skeletons from the medieval Æbelholt monastery’s ruins stored in the cellar all turned out to be waterlogged after the 30 centimetre surge of water into the museum’s yard and cellars finally had subsided.

Chinese PhD student: It's not just a fairy tale

There was no particular reason why Chinese PhD student Wenjie Li ended up focussing three years of her life on Danish fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen.

Growing up in Yichang City, just downstream from what has since become the massive Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, she read Andersen’s tales in school, just like 20 million other Chinese primary school pupils do every year.

But when her career as a lecturer in Comparative Literature at the China University of Petroleum in Beijing took off, the finer points of interest in theories of translation took off.

Fairy tale is bigger than the Bible

Forget your Bible, forget your Harry Potter. No, not even your worn-out reading copy of The Da Vinci Code is a candidate. A short story by Danish 19th century writer Hans Christian Andersen, the Little Match Girl, is probably the most-read piece of literature in mankind.

Since the Danish fairy tale writer was first put on the syllabus for Chinese middle schools in the 1920s, the weight of the numbers has left the Almighty, J.K. Rowling, and Dan Brown struggling for second place.

You can be a jihadist without being a terrorist

There are many ways to be connected to jihad, and only a few of them mean getting involved in violence or terrorism.

This could have been a short conclusion to the work of Ann-Sophie Hemmingsen, who has researched the subject for her PhD thesis, which she defended last week.

Danish students leave you out of the conversation

'I'm sorry. Could you please speak in English?'

For international students in Denmark, this is a phrase they are sick of repeating.

In many classes taught in English, Danish students suddenly slip into discussions in high-speed, complicated Danish, leaving international students completely in the dark.